Live Review : Wednesday 13 + South Of Salem + Sick N' Beautiful + Tarah Who? @ Club Academy, Manchester on April 12th 2023

We start tonight with Tarah Who? They are punky, indie kids with female vocals and a bass player with lovely hair. There's lots of movement and energy but not a huge amount of power in her voice and I find them a little bit uninspiring. I'm not really seeing anything new here and nothing really grips me - they weren't bad but they weren't brilliant either.

Sick N’ Beautiful are next, they are a new band for me and hail from Italy. They come on with full costume and face paint, they claim to be zombie space aliens and have all the costumes and facepaint required to make you believe them. One of them even looks like Groot and the female singer has a light-up bra that I find myself coveting! They're kind of electronica crossed with metalcore, there’s cover of Kiss’s “God Of Thunder” which is done well. It’s a cross between Slipknot and Abba and while that sounds like it wouldn't work it actually sort of does. It’s not just music, it’s theatre and they are very good at it but, but…. There’s always a but isn’t there? I was expecting slightly more from the music, it wasn't bad and they are competent musicians, the singer has a decent voice, they throw shapes and pose and posture all over the stage and the attitude was a breath of fresh air but, but….. I wanted spiky, spunky glam rock based on their looks and they just fell a little short for me.

South of Salem have featured in these hallowed pages several times in the last few months so I'm not going to do a massive lengthy review of them, because I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that I love them! I note that they have a new guitarist since I last saw them - he fits in nicely with the look and ethos so they still play the same upbeat energetic classic power rock. They also like to pose and pout, and they move about the stage like a warren of little Duracell bunnies, never still for more than a couple of seconds at a time. Joey's voice seems a little bit off tonight compared to how it usually is, I hope he’s OK. They rock out in a sort of graveyard gothy package, but when the twin guitars shine they sound almost Maiden-y in places which surprises me. The crowd are loving it, we get plenty of chance to sing along and although this is not the sort of band to warrant a circle pit they certainly manage to attract a lot of swaying and arm-waving. My friend remarks that they remind him of Avenged Sevenfold, but I think that might be the jaeger bombs talking and remind him that just because ‘Pretty Little Nightmare’ has the word Nightmare in it that doesn’t make it the same! Once again they are a silver lining, bringing light to darkness, and my only complaint is that the set wasn’t long enough.

Main man Wednesday 13 is probably best known for joining former Slipknot drummer Joey Jordison in his Murderdoll’s project back in 2002, but since those heady days of the early noughties he has built a solid reputation for himself as one of the best purveyors of horror-tinged dark-humoured shock-rock. His band hit the stage wearing all of the white face paint all of the time. It’s Zombie Kiss! The musical influences abound, here a smidge of Rob Zombie, there a dash of WASP and always a sprinkling of the finest Alice Cooper. It’s derivative but at the same time it’s brilliant. Wednesday’s tongue is firmly in his cheek as he takes us through such songs as ‘Bloodsucker Motherfucker’, ‘Die My Bride’, ‘Look What the Bats Dragged In’ and ‘Good Day To Be A Bad Guy’. It’s hammer horror, it’s all the cheese, it’s dark schoolboy humour, and if he had said nudge nudge, wink wink I wouldn’t have been surprised. Sadly there is not much between-song banter, just some long intro tracks and a dark stage usually, which was the only downside to me. Although the performance was great I was expecting some personality from this bedevilled front-man, and it didn’t really happen. He did ask us to scream for him quite a lot though, and we duly obliged! This meant that although I enjoyed the set to start with it did start to get a bit samey, and I started to lose interest. Until. Oh no, a drum solo! OK it was a sort of drum-along to the bit of ‘Tubular Bells” from The Exorcist, but even so, a drum solo? However, this turned out to be a bit of a saviour because once the rest of the band came back those few minutes of rest seemed to give them a new lease of life. They power through a version of Murderdoll’s ‘Nowhere’ (dedicated of course to Joey) and these glam vamps re-ignite the party atmosphere. It’s all uphill from there, we seem to have regained the sparkle and bounce and the rest of the set dances by in no time at all. The crowd join in, and by the time we get to final song ‘I Like To Say Fuck’ (complete with umbrella) it’s all a bit good. No it’s not original, yes it’s slick and polished but even so it’s good-time rock and roll and I for one can’t get enough of that.