Credit: Found On Internet

You know what the problem with almost every UK metal band is? The big, unspoken secret that most metal fans know in their bottom of the hearts, but just don’t want to admit? The secret that hums at the back of our mind every time we see another band play to a half-full toilet venue out in the suburbs?

It’s that almost every UK metal band is shit.

It’s not that there is a lack or talent, or originality, or the kind of media-savvy needed to make it, just a criminal lack of bands that are able to combine all three. Which is why we’ll never be short of the Lostprophets and Bullet For My Valentines, aping the Americans, but we’re always lacking when it comes to capitalising on our Raging Speedhorns and our Mendeeds.

We sell ourselves short – we tell ourselves ‘hey, we’re not selling out, we’re making the music that we want to make’ – so why is it then that there are plenty of US and European bands, making music heavy enough to sink aircraft carriers and being able to sell it? It’s because British metal bands are by and large shit, that’s why.

Which is possibly why Malefice are propping up the bottom half off the bill during DevilDriver’s tour, tonight being Sunday night at the Islington Academy. Thankfully Malefice are showing that they might have a better understanding of the whole package needed to be a great British metal band. Blasting the lid of their set open like a dustbin full of fireworks with their latest single ‘Risen’, the Berkshire quintet are treating this London show as close a home coming as they’re likely to get. By the time they’re sonically throttling the life out of the front rows with ‘Traitor’, they’ve built enough momentum to swell the packed sell-out crowd at into a respectably-sized circle pit. It seems I can’t pronounce Brit metal as truly dead just yet.

Following them are New Jersey’s God Forbid, who have achieved what I didn’t think possible - they’ managed to make metalcore seem pretty good. The de rigueur trend for the ‘cool’ metal kids is still bollocks, essentially a bit of melodic singing tagged on to some fairly ordinary riff’n’shout metal hardcore crossover, but God Forbid manage to make it something I actually want to pay attention to. Hell, it’s almost enough to make an old bastard want to mosh. Frontman Byron Davis has more charisma and stage presence in his flailing dreadlocks, than every pretty boy cover star that Kerrang! has run with in the last two years put together.