Live Review : Party Cannon + Street Soldier + Odysseus @ The Bread Shed, Manchester on September 30th 2023

You know when you are in for a good night when members of the audience are bringing in plastic bags full of foam penises. There ain't no party like a Party Cannon party, and the dedicated followers of Slam are proudly wearing their party hats and tooting their party blowers like their lives depended on it. For the northern leg of the very short “Partied in Half tenth anniversary tour" (as Scots it must pain them to call Manchester the northern leg) they have plumped for a distinctly Northern undercard.

Odysseus are one of the reasons why the Manchester scene currently has such a buzz about it. It is obvious that a good chunk of the audience had come especially to see them. Initially, the signs aren’t good, the sound for the opening salvo is frankly utterly appalling and it is akin to listening to them through an old mono transistor. However, it doesn't take long for the sound guy to sort their shit out and like one of those 3D Magic posters, everything suddenly slots into gear for the second track.

They are gnarly and heavy but there is also an infectious groove at the heart of their pulsating noise. The bass is slapped rather than played and for all the swirling tempestuous din that they create, it is ushered along by a fantastic rhythmic jive. The sound just gets better as they hurtled through their set, to the point where four songs in you can really hear the intricacies and variance of their sound.

The blackened heart of the band though is Rachael Downey. A commanding and overtly charismatic figure who just owns the stage. She interacts with the audience like she is playing Wembley Arena and gurns into cameras like she is Bono. She is the glue that holds everything together and you just can't keep your eyes off her as she stomps around the stage and on a number of occasions of it.

By the last track the sound is crystal clear and their minimal but utterly ferocious take on groove metal just burns into the retners. The pit convulses like they are headliners and there is a wonderful synergy at play between band and fans.  One very much to keep your eyes on.

It doesn't take long to figure out where Street Soldier hail from as the chants of "Yorkshire" echo around the bread shed long before they make it out of the stage. There is stage presence and then there is Street Soldier. Imagine Hatebreed fronted by a man-mountain bodybuilding Eminem with added self-deprecation and you're halfway there. There is a blatant self-awareness here that stops the whole thing from being convoluted and up its own bottom. Even though they take what they do incredibly seriously, they own the ridiculousness of the whole thing and revel in the absurdity.

Scotty Hall’s rhymes are incendiary and corrosive and he spits them out as if they were toxic. He already towers over the audience at 6 foot plus plus, but chooses to gain even more height by standing on an elongated gantry like some Roman Emperor observing the chaos rolling out in front of him. The other star of the show is Laurie Caudwell. Sticking him way at the back on his drums doesn't stop him from joining in the mayhem and being as much of an instigator and ringmaster as Scotty. His drumming is, as ever, insane. Tight military patterns are elongated in size and in speed, to the point where his hands blur as he pounds out the rhythm.

As with Odysseus they have brought their own fan base (presumably the bastards that keep chanting Yorkshire) and the pit is full of Street Soldier merch-adorned hard-core kids chasing that imaginary wasp as hard as they can. A breathless and cathartic performance that beautifully balances keeping it real with having a laugh.

The overriding feeling of Party Cannon’s set is "bloody hell, how the buggery have we been doing this for 10 years”. During that decade they have become legends in their own lunchtime and not just because of “that” meme and “that” logo. They take the poker-faced seriousness of death metal and go tell it where to shove it's over elongated view of itself. But this juvenile and infantile take on slam doesn't mean there is any sloppiness to their performance. The oxymoron at the heart of Party Cannon is that there is a searing technicality to what they do. 

The musical ability of the band is utterly incredible, and it is blindingly obvious that you have to be virtuoso musicians to play at the speed that they do. Their tracks may be puerile and obsessed with buggering people with party poppers, but the potty mouth lyrics are wrapped around some of the most musically dexterous riffages you will come across.

The crowd has come to party and the cavernous confines of the venue means there is plenty of room for people to be as stupid as they want. The aforementioned foam penises are banded around like golden idols and the dancefloor is strewn with confetti and inflatables. Various audience members bundle over the barrier not to stage dive but instead to collect beach balls and send them careering back into the pit. As ever there is also at least one blow-up Orca on show and it is ridden in ways that would make members of the RSPCA eyes water.

There is something wonderfully ironic about celebrating and promising to play in full an EP that is essentially three tracks long and 15 minutes in length. The material from "Partied in Half” is spread around the set and the seldom-played ‘Tyrone’, ‘You put that Sugar Down’ is preluded by an obviously pre-rehearsed skit involving original member Jack Welsh. He "storms" the stage to take umbrage at a proposed acoustic interlude and instead beseeches them to put ‘Tyrone’ back in the setlist. Obviously enjoying his reconciliation with the band that he created, he appears again before ‘High Five Ghost’ for another prearranged prop-filled stage invasion where he literally spills out his guts in the name of party metal and then anoints the crowd with them.

It's all very silly and immensely enjoyable but the music is so wonderfully constructed that it doesn't descend into pure parody or chaos. Party Cannon play the most deliciously intense and all-consuming death metal that the tomfoolery just adds another level, as opposed to overshadowing it. We career to a close with Jack once again joining his former bandmates, this time to scream along with defining dity ‘We Prefer the Term Living Impaired’ . We then get the obligatory photo and heartfelt thank you’s, and we are let back out into the drizzly reality of a Mancunian September evening with our hearts warmed by the life-affirming affinity of party metal.

Disclaimer : Photos were shot at Damnation Festival 2021