Live Review : Midnight + Night Demon @ Academy 3, Manchester on June 16th 2022

Night Demon are spectacularly good this evening because they don't try to be anything they are not, this is down-the-line rebel-rousing metal and it hits the spot with pinpoint accuracy. The guitar work is exemplary, minimal but with the occasional appropriate sprinkling of flair. They know that we don't want long convoluted solos, what we want are short well-defined bursts of power that we can bang our heads to and they provide it in abundance.

There is something wonderfully reassuring about what they doing. It is fundamentally old school with all the trappings and all the flamboyance removed. It might seem out of place alongside the inventiveness of Midnight, but it is still wonderfully evocative and immersive. For an hour I just lose myself in the beauty of three men plying power chords and rumbling bass lines. There may be cliché aplenty within their songs, but that doesn't stop them from being rampant singalongs, allowing even those not familiar with Night Demon to bellow along with glee. We get a visit from death himself (to break the spell it's a roadie in a mask and a cape) for ‘The Chalice’ and they even manage to snatch an encore and come racing back with closer ‘Night Demon’. I talk a lot about doing things different with our music. Night Demon are the complete antithesis of that. There is nothing different here at all, but that doesn't stop it from being utterly mesmerising. This is what ensnared me in the first place, this is exactly what captured my heart all those years ago. This is heavy metal in its truest sense, and it is utterly wonderful.

Midnight are a misnomer. They take two fundamentally polar opposite genres and splice them together. What they are doing shouldn't work but it does. You see Midnight are a punk band using Black Metal goblin-esque vocals and its obsession with raiding the dressing-up box. You see if you remove Athenar’s howls and jettison the ornate hoods, you have a highly authentic high-octane punk band. Not punk in that insipid, diluted candy-floss flavoured mush that the Americans now sell back to us, but punk as in that nihilistic and game-changing explosion of primal power that changed music forever in the mid-70s. Midnight capture perfectly that potent vociferous chaos that was the heart of the punk revolution. They have a disruptive anarchistic rage that brings to mind grainy footage of the pistols at the peak in the 100 club.

Musically Midnight are exceptionally simplistic, over the course of an hour set there are barely three chords used (in fact you could say this is Status Quo played a double or even triple time). This is not about complexity, this is about vibrant stupidity and they provide oodles of that. Everything is stripped back to the bare bones and then delivered in a rush of vivacious pulsating energy. You can't take your eyes off them, this is by far the most frantic, messy and utterly absorbing thing I have seen in years. They may be only three of them (Athenar and two unnamed place fillers) but they are freaking everywhere. Up on amps, swinging from lighting poles and jumping over the photo pit into the front row. You name it, they attempt it.

The crowd are swept up in the distorted wonderfulness. The pit becomes the entire room and bodies fly over the barriers like a swarm of locusts. The energy transmitting from the stage exhilarates the waiting masses, the faster Midnight plays the more unruly the chattering classes become. This is pure exhilaration personified, the boundaries between band and audience are not just blurred they are torn down completely. As stage divers exit the photo pit, Athenar grabs them and slams his head onto their fists.

A true encore is when an audience beckons back a band when they hitherto had no intention of returning. This happens tonight, the stage lights had even come up and the post-gig music had started blaring but the fevered chants of "one more song" are so enticing that Midnight returns even though it is obvious that they had a not planned to. ‘Endless Slut’ is the final track, and it is as puerile, crude and gloriously unsophisticated as the rest of its brethren.

That is the beauty and the wonder of Midnight. On numerous occasions they moniker themselves as idiots from Cleveland but actually what they are doing is really really clever. They have re-claimed the primordial simplicity of pure unadulterated punk and dragged it screaming and kicking into metal. They have realised that to engage and enthral an audience you do not need to be a virtuoso musician and you need no more three chords. What they have managed to bottle is that invigorating combination of being ramshackle enough so that it feels like it all could fall apart at any minute but also being competent enough to make sure that it doesn't. Utterly utterly extraordinary.