Here's the scene, downtown Guelph is a lot like the movies on a Friday night. Across the road from us is a club, which you can see a discoball going in, with a lineup all the way down the length of the building, on the other corner is an Irish pub gradually filling up with people and on our corner is a handful of metalhead's getting some fresh air in between bands. The District, tonight's venue, is the second floor of a building called Van Gogh's Ear so underneath us during this night of Black and Death Metal are some people after a long day of work just wanting to relax at the bar. Above us, looked like some sort of dance party, while the bands talked you could hear the "bass" thumping away but I'm sure they could feel the floor shake from the sheer power of Metal going on. Tonight's headliner is UNBOWED, local band from Guelph who got the chance to headline the ASHBRINGER and AMIENSUS tour for tonight only with the help of VOW OF THORNS opening the night.

VOW OF THORNS hit the stage about 9:45pm, being locals from London, Ontario I have heard of them but don't recall listening to them before tonight, this is a band that can bring a style of ambient, instrumental Black Metal that you normally don't hear. Although not completely instrumental, there were very few lines of lyrics to each of the songs. The band pounded away and drew in a few of the fans in the crowd and after about half an hour the band said their good nights and left the stage.
 

A bunch of us went outside for about 15 minutes when we could hear ASHBRINGER'S set about to begin, those of us outside quickly made our way back and prepared for what was to come. This is another band along the lines of VOW OF THORNS who were mainly instrumental and relied more on the dark story telling a guitar can have, being a band up from America for 3 shows only they drew in a bit of their own crowd who may have thought they would have never gotten the chance to see this band live. This was a band I didn't even know about before the announcement of UNBOWED playing the Canadian dates of this tour and unfortunately I couldn't tell you what songs they played but the band was active, although not talking to the crowd much this was a band that was tight live. Before you knew it, it was over though, it didn't really even seem like they got started.
 

After another small breath of fresh air we went back and were greeted by AMIENSUS, this was something to look forward to. Another band out of America, they had a good fanbase here tonight although the crowd wasn't big, the crowd could get loud for these Death Metallers. Drawing out the headbangers, AMIENSUS played a mix of songs from each of their albums and at the end even decided "fuck it, we're gonna play another one" which got the fans super pumped up. Everyone was getting super into it, when the song ended you could tell on everyone's face that they needed that level of Metal, everyone was ready for the last band of the night.
 

I was a fan and then I was a friend, this was my third time seeing UNBOWED and second time in this building. I was surprised tonight, UNBOWED has started wearing their own form of Corpse paint which made them look like they'd been in combat in a forest, covered in dirt and blood. The band were here to show off a few things, first was that their new album "Collapse The World" was just as good live as it was studio. The second was that they don't forget their first EP, which they played a couple songs from. Last was to show off the new EP that's coming out at some point, opening with a song from it. The band took the stage and the crowd was ready to go, there werent many of us, but the crowd could still get a pit going. Playing "A New Kingdom" and "Gwyn Ap Nudd" and even having vocalist Ioan Tetlow jump into the crowd to get pits going, the crowd was eating it up. Now comes the fun part, a little break in the music. Ioan, takes his shirt off and grabs a drinking horn filled with blood (starting to sound like some metal fanfiction here), Ioan gets down on his knees, raises the horn to the Gods and dumps the blood on his face and down his chest, preforming the rest of the show covered in blood (and again, jumping in and starting the pit like this). After songs like "Otherworld Arise" and "As Winter Claims My Soul" we reach the end of the night, closing out the show the band cranks it up to 11 and breaking into "Blood and Ash" before saying goodnight.
 

The streets filled with a few dozen metalheads, walking out of the venue to be faced with a crowd who had not only been able to hear the amazing metal from across the road, but clearly didn't get what it meant to those of us inside, but who cares they had been standing in line since the beginning of the show and by the time our night was done (and all of us were happy and ready for bed) they were still waiting to get started. Special thank you to Jenna McCarthy for the photography and to the guys in Unbowed for not yelling at me for standing around in the way to get to talk with you all a bit after the show was over!