Battle Beast / Serenity / Brymir - The Garage, Glasgow Monday 30th September 2024

The three-band bill was sold out and most of the audience turned up early on a Monday night to see Finland’s Brymir open the show. I could tell they were a ‘proper’ metal band because I couldn’t quite make out the band name from their logo and the verses were sung with a “harsh” vocal that rendered the words largely indecipherable to my normally soft rock-attuned ears. Great songs though and the choruses with “clean” metal vocals were a treat in a performance that went down very well with a crowd who were on the band’s side and involved from the start. Joona Bjorkroth (the son of Bjork and Dave Lee Roth?) normally puts in a double shift as guitarist for Brymir and the headliners but he is absent for this leg of the tour on paternity leave. Singer Viktor Gullichsen led the band through a boisterous set covering songs about star portals, Facebook and fish (complete with foam fish prop) before finishing with the excellent ‘Wings of Fire’. This was their first show in Scotland but they have clearly conquered a whole new set of fans.

Happily, Serenity were back at full strength following Georg Neuhauser’s recovery from lung inflammation. Famously, Georg is a historian at an Austrian university, so not only are Serenity’s sets full of rollicking good power symphonic metal tunes songs but they also comprise the most savoury and bodacious rock & roll history lesson since ‘Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure’ but without the bogus facts (Joan of Arc definitely was not Noah’s wife!) Marco Pastorino from primo Italian rockers Temperance is also involved with Serenity now and completes a very good all-baldy vocal front line alongside Georg, while also adding some great guitar work and song-writing. After some very well-received bangers like ‘The Fall of Man’, ‘Souls and Sins’ and the particularly excellent ‘Set the World on Fire’, the band diverge from their usual set-list to shamelessly suck up to the locals by including the largely acapella ballad ‘In the Name of Scotland’, which is appreciated by the Glasgow crowd who respond with the traditional sweary ‘Here We Go’ chant in tribute. ‘Legacy of Tudors’ and ‘Lionheart’ wrapped up a splendidly enjoyable set from a band who will be very welcome to return as headliners any time they like.

I think the last time Battle Beast were in Glasgow there was a modest turnout, probably because their show clashed with the excellent WinterStorm festival down the coast in Troon, so they seemed genuinely pleased to be looking out at a passionate sold-out audience this time. This reprise of the Circus of Doom tour was a re-schedule after Noora tore arteries in her neck last year but she was very definitely back on full throttle tonight, powering through ‘Circus of Doom’ and ‘Straight to the Heart’ to get things started. With keytar to the fore throughout a fast and furious Eurobeat metal onslaught, the room was bouncing all night long and singing along enthusiastically to monster tunes like ‘Bastard Son of Odin’ (“born to kick your ass”). With Noora throwing shapes and plenty smoke and giant sparklers going off, there was a bit of a party atmosphere and a relentless pace, broken up on occasion when Eero Sipila stepped up to release his inner Simba with a sing-along of Disney’s ‘Can You Feel the Love Tonight’ while dispensing cold gin accompanied by a bit of ‘I Was Made for Loving You’. That probably gave Noora’s voice a well-deserved rest. Check out the band’s live stream of the show (link below) and especially the key change in ‘Eye of the Storm’ at about 43:30 in for a small example of what she can do. Very impressive indeed.

Overall, this was a fantastic value-for-money show with each band bringing something slightly different to the party so I’ll be watching out for each of them in the future. Battle Beast in particular, are going to need a bigger room.