Periphery House of Blues, Boston, MA 12 September 2019
I’ll start this one off with a disclaimer – I don’t know much about metal. While I’m quite familiar with where the genre intersects others, I’m woefully uneducated on metal when it’s not prefixed or suffixed with a hyphen connected to something more familiar, nor the various subgenres and styles like djent that exist therein. What I do know is that Periphery moves with an energy unlike any other band I’ve listened to, and their latest record, Periphery IV: Hail Stan, continues the trend of blistering blast beats supporting sweeping progressive metal sagas.
HAIL STAN is a true journey of a record, beginning with the band’s longest song to date, ‘Reptile’. Like many of the songs on the record, ‘Reptile’ is a tale of blood and war and carnage, in this case following a drug addict named Billy who leads an ultimately doomed resistance against the titular reptilian menace. On ‘Blood Eagle’, vocalist Spencer Sotelo takes the perspective of a Viking, recounting the clashes between their polytheistic, nature-focused, and often brutal beliefs with early Christians.
The album is awash with death, violence, and brutality, and for much of the album the music strives to match the lyrical content with an equal dose of high-adrenaline sound. Founding guitarist Misha Mansoor leads an arsenal of guitars that backs Sotelo’s wild vocals with a wall of the classic djent sound, which – coupled with drummer Matt Halpern’s vicious, superhuman kicks – creates the noisy, machine-gun grind that defines Periphery’s music. It’s endlessly engrossing to listen to the band form that titanic engine of sound, pause to let one or two of the guitarists dive out with an interesting riff or solo for a breather, and then just as quickly meld back into their trademark churning cohesion. Across its 16 minutes, ‘Reptile’ also contains a number of spacious choruses, owing to the band’s history in the progressive metal genre. It’s undeniably thrilling to hear a song carry itself between such soaring highs and profoundly undulating lows.
Live at the House of Blues on a late-summer evening, Periphery brought Stan to bear nearly in full force, performing two thirds of the album’s tracks including ‘Reptile’’s vast expanse, which seemed even more monstrously epic before the nearly sold-out crowd that had been digging on the new record since its release in early April. Over the past five months, the Periphery devoted have been nursing their desire to mosh to these new tracks, and the pure catharsis was evident in across all the present faces, as well as the circle pit that formed between the stage and soundboard, bodies crashing together wearing their latest Periphery adornments, including a nearly ubiquitous hoodie reading “We Come For War”, an iconic line from ‘Blood Eagle’.
The band performs with an astounding ferocity, with Sotelo at the head of the pack, goading the crowd and stoking the fires in each audience member, raising their voices in unison with him. Guitarists Mansoor, Jake Bowen, and Mark Holcomb all stalk the front of the stage as well, peering into the crowd and giving them a close-up of the inimitable technical skill that makes the band’s music possible. Only Halpern remains at the back of the stage behind his kit, a king on this throne of sonic creation. At one point, Sotelo leaps into the pit between the stage and barricade, climbing up the wall and leaning head-first into the crowd, losing himself in the sea of outreached hands and agape mouths singing his lyrics alongside him. He moves across the entire barrier, stage right to stage left, bringing as many people as he can into the ritual.
Everything about Periphery is a bit extreme – the gory narratives of their lyrical world; the physical skill with which they write and play music; and the performance of Sotelo as the masthead that united band with audience. Even as a relative metal outsider, it’s not hard to imagine how the band has won so many eardrums through the years. They exude passion in every note with the technical chops to match, and regardless of one’s background in music, it’s practically impossible to witness something of this caliber and not be enthralled and enticed to dive deeper into Periphery’s oeuvre.
