At the beginning of February I made my way to the O2 Institute Birmingham as I have done many times before to photograph a band, tonight my headliner was Karnivool, a progressive rock band hailing from Perth Australia. Tonight however, it wasn’t Karnivool who would capture my attention, they were magnificent let’s not get that wrong but it was their support act ‘The Ocean Collective’ who would take my breath away. I stood there in the photo pit listening to the way they interweaved beautiful harmonious passages into savage walls of sound which filled the venue with an air of dread. They reminded me of one of my favourite bands from recent years, Copenhagen’s LLNN so I wasn’t too surprised to see a LLNN sticker on one of their flight cases at the front of the stage as they had actually toured together recently. Vocalist Loic Rossetti would often distort himself, awkwardly headbanging in time to the music with his hands brushing on the floor with his head almost touching the stage at times. I photograph a lot of metal acts and unfortunately many blend into one another over time, so to have a band stand out so prominently is incredible to me; there were no gimmicks to be found, just a genuinely amazing performance with incredible material to back them up.
