[Live Review] PARKWAY DRIVE (Newcastle)

Parkway Drive - credit Ashlee Kellehear 05

Newcastle Panthers
Thursday September 26, 2013 :

The Parkway Drive train seems to never stop running and after a bunch of sold out gigs around the country, they came to Newcastle Panthers to grace the ears of the Novacastrians. The ’10 Years’ tour is an exceptional celebration of the four albums they’ve released in that time. On tour with them are two Aussie bands Confession and Thy Art Is Murder.

Confession opens the show with vast energy and wit, as we’ve come to expect from vocalist Michael Crafter over the years. Unfortunately, they don’t stick around for long, only playing four or five songs to make way for Thy Art who roll out with what was to be the harshest sound of the night. Drawing a majority of tracks from their latest album, Hate, they stick around for eight of their best to make way for the juggernaught of a set that is Parkway Drive’s ’10 Years’.

The set opens with a short video introduction about the tour, highlighting their 10 years, four albums and the fact that they were originally just a couple of mates having fun; and to me that’s what it still looks like.

The set progresses through the years from 2003 to 2012. They start off with ‘I Watched’ from their first release in 2003: a split EP with I Killed the Prom Queen. Despite coming from a period when the band was unknown by most people outside of Byron, the crowd moshed as if it was from their latest… and the rest of the set followed in a similar fashion.

Shooting through Don’t Close Your Eyes with the title track as well as ‘Smoke Em’ If Ya Got ‘Em’ followed by ‘Gimmie A D’, ‘Anasasis’ and ‘Pandora’ from Killing with a Smile, the crowd knew we were moving into more familiar territory.

The opener from Horizons begins and as the crowd goes wild, I do too. They launch into ‘Siren’s Song’ before smashing through ‘Boneyards’, ‘Breaking Point’ and the title track, ‘Horizons’. This album was to be the highlight of the night and so it should have been, Horizons is to me the quintessential Parkway Drive album and I believe it always will be.

From this point on the vibe is somewhat down as the hardcore fans of the band’s earlier albums are left satisfied with the pre-2010 releases, however the set must progress, and it does so well with hard hitters ‘Sleepwalker’, ‘Deliver Me’ and ‘Home is for the Heartless” from their critically acclaimed Deep Blue. The set moves through the final album for the last three songs with ‘Old Ghost/New Regrets’, ‘Dark Days’ and “Wild Eyes”, the latter of which featured an awesome circle pit surrounding a lit disco ball.

The band left the stage but everyone knew they had one more to go with ‘Carrion’ from Horizons, which has been the standard encore song for Parkway for as long as I can remember.

The night was long but Parkway Drive never had a dull moment. Ten years might seem like a long time, but I think they’ve got another decade in them yet.

Reviewer: Andrew Scott
Photographer: Ashlee Kellehear

[nggallery id=152]