Live Review: Between The Buried & Me, Chon, Dyssidia

If you were expecting the complete concert experience for the latest Between The Buried & Me LP, Coma Ecliptic, know you'll be in store for the opposite. BTBAM deliver a diverse and career-spanning setlist on this tour, channelling their talent, focus, passion and unique energy into a world class live show.

Adelaide support Dyssidia have catapulted into the new year, easily improving upon the previous year's milestone performance opening for Opeth. Vocalist Mitch Brackman is projecting his vocals with absolute power and confidence, exploring a range that is as dynamic as it is challenging. Corey Davis is paving his way to becoming one of Australia's finest progressive exports by way of his guitar playing — it would not be surprising to soon see him on international top lists.

What to say about San Diego's Chon? Simply put this group of artists are able to surmise years' worth of meaningful emotional experiences into a few bars of melody. These melodies are then repeated and built upon in a neverending symphony. There's something special in the sheer sense of harmonious union that was shared between the members of the audience and the performers on stage.

Between The Buried & Me are a formidable live band. Tommy Rogers is a grandiose frontman whose endurance, ferocity and raw edge is only matched by a more recent divulgence into soaring cleans and soft smooth croons. Rogers revels in the easy way he commands the stage, clearly controlling the audience as he steers the show. Dustie Waring and Dan Briggs constitute what is the essential bone structure of BTBAM. Blake Richardson carves out a mean barrage on the drums; he's pure blunt force trauma in terms of speed, accuracy and quick changes. Guitarist Paul Waggoner leads the charge heroically, really engaging with the crowd while enjoying what he does immensely. Together the band is a cohesive machine.

Node and The Coma Machine make marked impressions of Coma Ecliptic's live appeal: grand, symphonic and screaming of Broadway — it's a new horizon. During a screaming rendition of Telos, when the epic composition takes an unexpected dive into a soulful, key-laden bridge, the fire door was opened inexplicably by security, as if opening the windows of a 1920s Jazz Club to let the cool in. Rogers sings the line 'Was I ever really alive?' into the song's operatic climax, which was, well... exactly that.