Farewell tours should be taken with a pinch of salt, they have a tendency to be used as marketing techniques or just a way to drum up desperation among fans to sell tickets but this one feels different. Stray from the Path are a hardcore punk band that have been the victim of controversy due to their drummer, Craig Reynolds, featuring Alex Terrible of Slaughter to Prevail on his podcast. I can say with much confidence that Stray from the Path won’t be back any time soon. With all the preamble aside, their Manchester show was a celebration of aggression and righteous indignation featuring Calva Louise, Graphic Nature and Alpha Wolf as support.
Calva Louise were first, and due to how early the show started, the audience was a bit sparse. Still, Calva Louise performed like it was a packed house. Drummer Ben Parker put his absolute all into his performance. From the very start, it was clear that drummers and vocalists would be the stars of the night, and this was absolutely the case.
Vocalist Jess Allanic had some of the best vocals of the evening as she effortlessly switched between vicious growls and angelic cleans, all while playing multiple instruments including synth and guitar. Being a Venezuelan band, Calva Louise featured quite a bit of Latin influence, with tracks like ‘El Umbral’ and ‘Aimless’ built around an almost reggaeton-style percussion.
An interesting band for sure, but much more laid back and reserved compared to the later acts on the bill. I suppose that made them the prime candidate to open this wild and unhinged show.
Next up was Graphic Nature, a London-based band made up of matching outfits, drop-tuned guitars and an insatiable appetite for violence. They have that Southern hardman energy, but the most important aspect of their stage presence is the hardcore positivity and sense of community to back it up.
Tracks like ‘White Noise’ come with extended monologues about mental healthcare and the self-awareness of knowing where to put the aggression and negative feelings. Even the more straightforward ragers like ‘Sour’ and ‘Killing Floor’ have nuance to them, and if you can’t pick up on the nuance during the show, you can at least appreciate just how sonically punishing it is.
Unfortunately the audience was a bit stoic at the start, but they were saving their energy for an incoming storm: Alpha Wolf.
Alpha Wolf are a band that fully commit on stage and take it to absolute extremes with tracks like ‘Feign’ and ‘Acid Romance’. The band walk around the stage in a strangely casual manner but still manage to maintain this menacing and intense demeanour, particularly vocalist Lochie Keogh, who acts as a brilliant hype man and pit commander.
You can pinpoint the exact moment when the security team collectively die inside, and it’s when Lochie Keogh bellows “Do you know how to crowdsurf?” From that moment on, the crowd was liquid, an endless sea of bodies violently slamming against itself with only a few brave heroes in yellow to stop them injuring themselves.
It feels like Alpha Wolf upped their game as an entity of sheer hostility and aggression for this tour. They seem like a band that respects the acts that came before them and truly wanted to help put on the hardcore show to end all hardcore shows in tribute to Stray from the Path. With all this bedlam going on, the show was still not over. We only had a few minutes between Alpha Wolf and Stray from the Path, and things would only get wilder.
Standing in front of an Andy Warhol-style banner of Jack Nicholson in The Shining, Stray from the Path emerged following the vicious war cries of Sergeant Hartman from Full Metal Jacket, and the tone was set. ‘Kubrick Stare’ was a magnificent intro; the almost mechanical-sounding dissonance made for an uneasy atmosphere as the crowd was bombarded by psychotic screams and bombastic instrumentation on all fronts.
“You will always be welcome in this community,” said frontman Andrew DiJorio as they burst into ‘Goodnight Alt-Right’, an absolute war cry of a song that makes it abundantly clear who is not welcome in our scene. The attempts the alt-right have made to infiltrate this sect of the punk movement have been unsuccessful while Stray from the Path were together, and in tribute, for the sake of preserving the movement, we must continue to keep them out.
The whole show was unbridled fury at the state of the world. Tracks like ‘Shot Caller’ speak to the power imbalance in society; its intense attitude and rubbery guitar work are enough to make you want to scream and find the nearest CEO. We are in the midst of an apocalyptic event, and the best way we can deal with this is by focusing our aggression together in our safe spaces before leaving with a level-headed attitude and a desire for change.
The show was full of staples including the almost Dillinger Escape Plan-sounding dissonance of ‘Fortune Teller’, the rage-fuelled ‘Guillotine’ and the two-step anthem ‘First World Problem Child’. It was difficult to tell some of these songs apart as a new fan, but the same vibe was kept throughout the show: pure unbridled fury.
As the show ended and the outro music of ‘Don’t Stop Believin” by Journey played, there was this strange sense of accomplishment instead of sadness, as if everyone was thinking “yeah, we really did that, and now we move on.” The decades of work Stray from the Path have put in have given us so much amazing music that we’re all thankful for. Now that it’s done, hopefully the band will go their separate ways knowing they’ve done a good job and left this crowd in Manchester with amazing memories and the tools to create more in their absence.
Thanks Stray from the Path. We’ll miss you.
