ARCHITECTS @ The Vogue
Metalheads from around the province united at The Vogue Theater Thursday night to witness some of metalcores finest acts. Coming all the way from Brighton, the band Architects was joined by California-based Stick To Your Guns and Canadian band Counterparts, hailing from Ontario. The bands are in the middle of a month long North American tour with three Canadian stops, having played in Edmonton and Calgary the two nights prior.
Fans were lined up around the block, eagerly awaiting entry to the packed theatre, which was turned into a frat house, the pit floor littered with crushed beer cans. Despite it being an all-ages event, I was still surprised to see the odd high-school girl toughing out the crowd of head-banging males twice their size.
Counterparts hit the stage at 7:45 and had no trouble getting the crowd moving, filling up their set with highlights from their 2017 release “You’re Not You Anymore”. Vocalist Brendan Murphy displayed a contagious energy that broke past the level felt on the studio tracks. Wearing a sleeveless black tee and an accompanying baseball hat, the singer paced back and forth across the stage, pouring everything he had into the mic. The hardcore punk band’s two guitarists and bassist stood their ground and provided some strong screams of their own, giving Murphy room to breathe.
On the final song of the set, old fan-favourite “The Disconnect”, enthusiastic members of the crowd managed to get on stage and Murphy appeared happy to give them a shot at the mic, singing “I fucking hate the world, I fucking hate myself!” After getting his hands back on the mic, he finished off the banger and said his goodbye to the crowd with a friendly, “Have fun and be safe.”
Stick To Your Guns came up next and singer Jesse Barnett stormed on to the stage with a shout of “Vancouver! Let’s do this shit,” before plowing into their 2017 album’s (“True View”) lead single, “Married To The Noise”. The band put on a deafening performance with the instruments cranked up to the point where I know wasn’t alone in wishing I could hear more of the lyrics. If you weren’t already familiar with the songs, it would have been a struggle to follow along.
Despite the drowned-out vocals, Barnett put on a fierce performance supported by the well-rehearsed musicianship of the band. The singer also delivered two of the most thoughtful speeches of the night to the crowd.
“The time for waiting for the older, wiser, better generation to come along and save us all is done. It is done. And we play this next song in solidarity with the students of Parkwood, Florida and to every single student all over America and to the teachers all over America.”
Before entering one of the ragers off their latest release, “Doomed By You”, he had this to say:
“The truth of the matter is this: nothing in your life belongs to you, you own nothing, that’s just your imagination. Everything that we have in this split second of life that we have, we are borrowing, and once we are gone it goes back to which it came. So stop thinking that the things in your life define who you are. They’re just things, that’s all they are. I won’t be doomed by you.”
If you weren’t feeling the energy by the end of STYG’s set, there’s no doubt everyone was feeling it when the lights went out and Architects walked onto the stage. When the lights came up vocalist Sam Carter stood confidently behind the mic, wearing a black jacket and navy jeans, hands behind his back, nodding his head to the building chug of the guitar.
“Tell me was it all worth it, to watch your kingdom grow? All the anchors in the ocean haven’t sunk this low,” he sang on the opener “A Match Made in Heaven” (off their latest release from 2016 “All Our God Have Abandoned Us”) before belting out his iconic “BWAH!” into a soul-crushing breakdown the band would deliver many more times throughout the set.
It’s hard to imagine the vocals heard on the studio tracks being as strong live but Carter proved my doubts wrong by showing off an inhuman amount of strength and stamina in his screams over the course of the set. The incredible passion this man delivered was a sight to behold.
The band performed a very solid 16-song set that focused almost entirely on their two most recent albums, save for the track “These Colours Don’t Run” off their 2012 release “Daybreaker”. Highlights of the night included pre-encore closers “Gravedigger” and “Doomsday”, their two most viewed videos on YouTube. The energy in the crowd felt like it was going to explode, and people were crowd surfing left and right as if trying to escape from the impending blast.
The last time Architects were in Vancouver was in 2014 at the Rio. Since then they’ve lost a member to cancer. In 2016, founding guitarist and lead songwriter Tom Searle passed away after living for three years with melanoma skin cancer. During the performance, Carter took a moment to acknowledge their lost bandmate.
“It’s really important to us that you understand whose band we are and why we do this. We are Tom Searle’s band.”
This was followed by a crowd chant of “Tom, Tom, Tom” for a good twenty seconds, which Carter finished with,
“We are very, very fucking proud to be Tom’s band and the fact that you are here singing his lyrics, enjoying his songs means the fucking world to us so thank you for letting us keep his legacy alive.”
The three bands continue their tour heading South into the States, playing their final show March 16th in Atlanta.
ARCHITECTS Set List
Match Made In Heaven
Downfall
Naysayer
Deathwish
Broken Cross
Dead Man Talking
Gravity
Phantom Fear
Devil Is Near
C.A.N.C.E.R.
These Colours Don’t Run
Gravedigger
Doomsday
Memento Mori
Nihilist
Gone With The Wind
