Typically, venues the size of Cardiff University’s Y Plas are far from ideal when it comes to putting on a hardcore show. The hardcore ‘kids’ like their shows in a 10×10 metre room, where band and fan alike can come together in sweaty unison and shout to their heart’s content. But what we have here tonight is the hardcore tour of 2022, with two of the best bands around: Terror and Knocked Loose could make the Principality Stadium feel like Clwb Ifor Bach, and are in the capital tonight with something for the old and new school alike.
Scott Vogel, frontman of Los Angeles’ Terror, is well known in these parts: his previous outfit Buried Alive played Bridgend back in the late 90s, and south Wales has enjoyed numerous Terror shows since, though never in this big a venue. King of the “vogelisms” (Google it), Scott and the crew hit the stage with a ferocity and urgency that few bands 20 years into their career possess. They pummel Cardiff with a set culled mostly from their latest album Trapped In A World, with an energetic crowd hanging on Vogel’s every command right up until their finishing move Keepers Of The Faith is performed. The old school was represented by one of the very best here, with the gauntlet truly thrown down.
Things have moved on for headliners Knocked Loose since I last saw them at Clwb Ifor Bach in 2018. The young upstart band that I witnessed tear that venue apart has grown into one of hardcore’s leading lights, and it’s easy to see why. In singer Bryan Garris, they have their own little whirlwind of a frontman, who never stops moving as the band whip an already weary crowd into further hysteria – bouncing around, trading places and playing their instruments as if they hated them.
Older material like Billy No Mates is greeted with the same enthusiasm as newer tracks like God Knows, but it’s a cut from 2018’s Laugh Tracks that gives the assembled masses one last chance to let off some steam as Counting Worms whips the fans into a final stupor. It’s not 1986 and this is not CBGB’s – but hardcore is alive and kicking in 2022.
Y Plas, Cardiff University Students Union, Tue 8 Feb
words CHRIS ANDREWS