Captain Horizon + Exit State + Dakesis @ The Asylum 2, Birmingham – Friday 28th February 2014

Review and photos by Tony Gaskin

After announcing their deal with Rocksector Records and re-releasing their debut album, Captain Horizon are back on home turf with label mates Exit State and their good friends Dakesis, and with a good crowd filling up the Asylum 2 we were in for a top night of rock and metal.

Opening tonight were local Power Metal bastions, Dakesis. Going from strength to strength in this now familiar four piece line-up, they blast through a set of high class metal. From the get go they give 110%, Matt’s fretboard wizardry is dazzling, and Adam’s drum skills are amongst the best you will see. The huge bass of Ms Chatterley pummels your senses, but its the confident and powerful vocals of front woman Gemma Lawler that have come to the fore since the changes.

There were hints of some new material tonight, but the band are perfectionists and they felt they weren’t quite ready, so we’ll have to wait to hear the new stuff they’ve been working on for album number two.

Sandwiched between the two local favourites was Exit State who had travelled down from Lancashire to support their new label buddies. Straddling the fences of numerous rock genres, Exit State are one of those bands that you just have to say are a simply a Rock band. It’s heavy, melodic, angry, emotional. One minute classic riffs, the next three chord punk. But whatever they do, it’s done with passion and belief.

Front man Roy Bright is intense when he’s delivering each song, but friendly and amiable when bantering with the crowd, guitarist Matt Harris quietly and efficiently throws down the riffs and melodies with deceptive ease, with all the power and energy being expended by the drum and bass section of Messrs Hicks and Ireland. The highlight of the set was the magnificent “Crystalline”, one of those goose bump songs. I highly recommend you check these guys out. Every time I see them they seem to get better.

So to local heroes and newly signed up Captain Horizon. If you thought Exit State were hard to pin down then you’d be at a loss to come up with an all encompassing description for Captain Horizon. With an intellectual back line consisting of three university graduates, whose influences range from Mahler to Maynard James Keenan, the music is esoteric & technical but so beautifully crafted that you can easily get drawn into it’s complex layers and finally the risk of being too pretentious is kept in check by the fourth member, Whitty. A graduate from the old school of Rock ‘n’ Roll, he makes sure that the crowd doesn’t get isolated and the band get too detached from reality, he puts the human touch into the art of  their music. Songs like “Patch” and “Pious” would seem self indulgent without Whitty’s powerful and emotive vocals that humanise the songs. On the face of it, it seems a strange mix, but boy does it work.

With writing well under way, new material for the second album is nearly complete and with the support, knowledge and contacts of the people at Rocksector, then the Captain Horizon anomaly will be spreading far and wide in 2014

See more of Tony’s photos here;