Live review: Parkway Drive and symphony orchestra at the Sydney Opera House
Mixing symphonic instruments with metal-edged heavy music doesn’t make much sense on paper, but Australia’s leading metal act on Monday proved it was more than up to the challenge.
Two musical worlds collided in spectacular fashion at the Sydney Opera House on Monday night, when Australia’s biggest heavy metal band played under the sails with a symphony orchestra at a black-tie event filled with headbanging metalheads dressed to the nines.
Parkway Drive, from the sleepy coastal town of Byron Bay, brought its crushingly aggressive sonic style, meshed it with strings, woodwinds, brass and sundries, roped in a brace of choristers, and gave the concert hall a concert for the ages.
Mixing symphonic instruments with metal-edged heavy music doesn’t make much sense on paper.
It didn’t make much sense live or on record, either, until American masters Metallica created a proof of concept in 1999, nearly 20 years into its career, and gave an emphatic demonstration of how these strange bedfellows could share space with its live album S&M, which was given a reprise in 2019 with S&M2. Both releases topped charts here and abroad.
Open-minded metalheads found much to love in the novelty factor, but what made S&M a classic was the durability of the arrangements, which added much colour to the blacks, whites and greys of this most masculine – and occasionally meat-headed – of musical genres.
Monday night offered a deeply Australian take on what those Bay Area thrashers did Stateside. Like Metallica, Parkway Drive began working in a niche sub genre – metalcore, which foregrounded aspects of hardcore punk – before gradually progressing its sound toward the centre of heavy metal music, where the biggest possible audience lies.
After completing an arena-sized tour last year to mark its 20th anniversary, the quintet was offered the rare chance to perform at the Opera House, backed by an orchestra, for a one-off concert to be filmed for posterity. No sane, ambitious band turns down something like that, and nor do its fans. About 2000 tickets were sold in an instant; a mere fraction of the 65,000 who attended its national tour last year.
Scores of tickets were kept aside for the musicians’ friends and family members, as thanks for their support since the group began playing together in 2003 in the home of drummer Ben Gordon, situated on a street named Parkway Drive.
Gordon has become globally known for playing drums while spinning upside down through 360 degrees. That custom-made contraption didn’t make an appearance at the Sydney gig, but he still had pride of place in the centre of stage, with his instruments surrounded by a curtain of native plants and flowers.
The band’s production has grown across two decades to now include plenty of pyrotechnics befitting its status as a festival headliner, but these effects were absent on Monday, too. Instead, the musicians brought fire of a different sort, all while clad in matching black suits.
The concert’s exclusivity alone had the crowd elated from the outset, but novelty only lasts so long. What kept the eyes and ears engaged was an inspired setlist that spanned 2007’s Horizons through to songs from seventh album Darker Still (2022) and the live debut of recent single Sacred, all boosted by the orchestra’s contributions.
Frontman Winston McCall rarely shares his stages with other vocalists, but on Monday he did it twice, with MC Nooky of ARIA Award-winning hip hop trio 3%, who added Indigenous flavour to Shadow Boxing; and Jenna McDougall of Tonight Alive and Hevenshe, whose stunning vocal tone and control in A Deathless Song brought a splash of sunshine to what’s often a blokey subculture, albeit one beloved by plenty of women giving their full-throated approval.
The closeness of the audience would have felt familiar to the band’s early days of playing school halls and youth centres, with one major exception: they were all seated, which is a queer thing for an act whose music regularly inspires whirling circle pits of human bodies in motion.
It was hard music to sit still for, frankly, and at a few points the crowd was spurred to its feet – including signature song and set closer Wild Eyes – with devil horns raised in metallic salute, as Alec Roberts conducted his unnamed orchestra and McCall conducted his band’s ebullient fanbase.
Guitarists Luke Kilpatrick and bassist Jia O’Connor planted their feet to stand and deliver jagged riffs and grooves, while lead guitarist Jeff Ling was animated as he tore through his solos. As the band’s chief composer, he was at times overwhelmed by the richness of sound emanating from the 44 extra players behind him, whose parts were arranged by longtime collaborator Joel Farland.
Throughout the two-hour performance, the grins on the faces of Ling and McCall were mirrored by the classical players and choral singers on stage, as they looked out at a most unusual crowd inside our most recognisable building.
Far from polite, the besuited fans headbanged and screamed the words back to stage from the first moments of opener Home Is For the Heartless. In introducing another fan favourite named Carrion, McCall said, “Let’s make this feel like a Parkway show. Anyone that’s ever wanted to sing in the Opera House – this is your song.”
His lyrics in Carrion explore the pain of saying goodbye to loved ones left at home in order to go to work, which is what this band has been doing for two decades now: taking its music to the people, here and abroad, gathered in ever larger groups.
Monday night was a necessary step down in crowd size, but a major step forward in proving that, like Metallica, it could take its music from the moshpit to the conductor’s stand.
It felt like a milestone moment not only in the band’s career but in Australian music history, too, as this quintet of men playing heavy music for outsiders was invited to perform at a cultural landmark.
Once inside, it left nobody doubting its abilities as a singular, trailblazing artistic force with an unmatched aptitude to extend and expand itself, all while continuing to rise.
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