Live Review : Ingested + Fallujah + Mélancolia @ Rebellion, Manchester on April 20th 2024

The Mondays at the G-Mex, Oasis at Maine Road, Morrissey (before he became a racist twit) at the MEN and The Roses at Heaton Park. To the lexicon of great Mancunian homecomings we can now add Ingested at Rebellion. Despite the ludicrously early start time the place is heaving from the get-go. There is a fevered atmosphere that consists of a potent mixture of expectation and civic pride. Every conversation seems to major on our own individual roles in Ingested’s majestic ascension to the death metal top table. 

Mélancolia do a highly unscientific poll midway through their opening set and are surprised to find even five people who know they are. They hail from Melbourne down under and make great virtue of the fact that they have troubled “many kilometres” to be with us tonight. What is immediately obvious is that they are happily playing with the parameters of deathcore. Visually they come across as a Marilyn Manson fronted variant of this distinctive genre and musically they recall a distinctly pissed off Motionless in White.

Alex Hill has a sinister and rather creepy charisma about him. He has hit the dressing-up box hard, and spends a good proportion of the set staring at the spittle on his fingers. The joyous carnivalesque vibe of the room means that they are afforded a highly affable reception. They seem to really click with a Mancunian audience keen to throw themselves around with gay abandonment as soon as possible. Sadly technical hitches do slightly derail the increasing momentum of the set and there is a rather awkward moment where they seek new foot pedals whilst Joshua Taafe tries to tell an anecdote but even he decides is distinctly unfunny halfway through.

Thankfully order is quickly restored and they managed to win back all the positive reception is that they had previously amassed. There is a massive amount of melodic malevolence at play within their music and the atmospheric horror elements really expand the pallet of deathcore. They certainly impress the heaving masses and you can count on the fact that the next time they come here, there will be a lot more people able to affirm that they know who they are.

They should have been a three-band undercard, with South African’s Vulvodynia bringing the filthy slam. Sadly VISA issues have curtailed this and we are left to go straight into the much more refined waters of tech death superstars Fallujah. This is death metal with a postgrad degree in nuclear physics. It is intricate, precision-engineered, and consists of more individual pieces than a complex Lego set. It also constantly evolves before our very eyes. There is a continual shifting between hostility and luscious laid-back melody.

In some ways, the component that makes it death metal is the harsh guttural tones of new boy Kyle Schaefer. His gruff penetrating vocals provide a distinct juxtaposition to the astonishingly methodical process of bandleader Scott Carstairs. Whilst they present a much more cerebral tone than tonight's headliner, they are still afforded a rapturous and raucous response by the now full-capacity crowd. They usher forth the first stage divers of the night and every track is responded to with heartfelt ecstasy, even the new song they debut at the tail end of the set. Intelligent and sophisticated, there is still enough bite and bile on show for it to feel that they really belong on this bill.

But let's be honest tonight is about one band and one band only. The cries of Slamchester swell up a good fifteen minutes before Ingested take the stage and there is an air of collective ownership on show. These are our boys and they have done good. The roar that echoes around Rebellion as they take the stage threatens to rip the roof off. Whilst they embrace the title of slam kings of Manchester, this is a much more housetrained version of Death Metal's vulgar younger cousin. They bring a level of refinement and elegance to the party, that is usually absent within Slam.

This however doesn't mean that they are any less brutal and corrosive. Tonight is an absolute masterclass in the primal beauty of violent noise. Everything is ratcheted up beyond 11 and chaos ensues both on and off the stage. Jay operates as a proud Mancunian ringmaster and he stops ‘Pantheon’ dead when he becomes concerned that the pit they got last night in London may eclipse what we are bringing here in his hometown. We of course are not going to be outclassed by a bunch of posy Southerners and the confines of the pit are suddenly stretched out to the point where it encapsulates the entire room.

Ingested are on fire this evening. With seven albums under their belt, they are beholden of an armoury to be able to usher forth an absolute barrage of banger after banger. They know that the assembled masses within Rebellion have been with them since the beginning and therefore they don't major too much on the recently released “The Tide of Death and Fractured Dreams” (even though it is an absolute corker). Instead, they career around their career with manic intensity.

Jay is an absolute dynamo and he pumps up the crowd with a wonderful mixture of northern irreverence and hometown bravado. He invites us to join him and pretty soon there is a continual parade of bodies manifesting themselves on the stage. You know it's a good night when people are queuing to be able to leap off into the abyss of the front row. However, some interlopers choose to stick around and during ‘Better Off Dead’, Jay’s vanity stool is resplendent with a couple of backup dancers reminiscent of the Anadin sisters.

Their star may well be in the ascendancy, but there is no rockstar egos at play here. Jay’s voice has a twang of emotion in it when he states that this is their largest ever hometown crowd and he continually intones that this evening we have made him very proud Northern. They end the main set with a gargantuan ‘Impending Dominance’ that just drips with majestic power. By this point, there are so many trespassers upfront that is hard to work out who is a band member and who is an enthusiastic amateur.

An encore was always on the card and they return to usher forth an absolutely astonishing version of ‘The Divine Right of Kings’. Jay divides the lower section of Rebellion in half and then orchestrates the largest and most savage wall of death this venue has ever witnessed. Those who don't partake, film it and you feel that you have witnessed one of those moments that will live on in Mancunian folklore for many years to come. 

There is one more morsel to dispense and ‘Skinned and Fucked’ ratchets everything up even further. Jay is now a blur of kinetic energy as he screams into the front row. The pit has reached peak velocity and it is becoming hard to pick out a member of the audience that is yet to visit the stage.

Ingested have spent eighteen years becoming an overnight success but tonight was the moment that they arrived. Tonight is when they proved themselves to be the most exciting, vibrant, and vociferous British death metal act. A proud Mancunian institution with the fortitude and ferocity to now take on the world. Slamchester’s forebearers are on the cusp of something really quite special, but tonight showed that whatever is next they are still bonded with blood to their hometown.

Check the “In The Flesh” page for more photos!
Ingested, Fallujah, Mélancolia