Drowning Pool
Huddersfield's Siren Lake are first on the bill tonight and get a poor turnout, just before they came on there were five people in the venue, fortunately the crowd swells to more like fifteen for most of their set. Their style is textbook hardcore but it's a shambolic performance from start to finish, bereft with sound problems throughout it doesn't help when vocalist Stu falls off the small drum riser during the first song!
The problem with Siren Lake is that all their songs are unnecessarily complicated, they try to fit too much in and much of the time it just doesn't work. Craig's guitar work is impressive but when the bassist Liam is trying to be equally impressive they lose any kind of bottom line rhythm. Drummer Daryl is clearly finding it hard to follow what's going on due to the rough sound and it all comes across as very disjointed.
Second vocalist and part time mini synth player Arron looks like he's not ready for this yet. When things go wrong (such as the synth not coming through) he looks embarrassed and unsure what to do with himself. The more accomplished Stu also suffers from a tendency to turn his back on the crowd and misses the opportunity to make any kind of impression. There are a few moments when the dual vocals work well but overall it's not enough to save the performance. They have some promising ideas but they need a huge amount of tightening up