Forget the Unholy Alliance tour, there’s only one contender for the crown of Most Extreme tour of 2008 – the Summer Slaughter tour. When it rolled into London town like some kind of evil death-metal juggernaut, driven by a war criminal high on his own crimes, Music Towers made sure we were down at the front.

No-one’s quite sure why The Berzerker, the heaviest thing to ever crawl out from Melborne’s underbelly, are first on the bill. We can only imagine that since leaving Earache records and striking out under their own Berzerker Industries label, the band has lost some clout with the booking agent. Punters are still streaming into the Islington Academy when The Berzerker’s mix of death metal blast beats and turbo-charged electronics turn the venue into one experiment in pure noise terror. The rabid growl of ‘Forever’ sounds like it wants to take a meathook to your guts and leave you in a sorry, crumpled mass. Luke Perry (pictured right) and co have thrown down the gauntlet to the kids

The Darkness come from Lowestoft . They are shit. Annotations Of An Autopsy also come from Lowestoft. They are brutal. The Darkness believe in a thing called love. Annotations Of An Autopsy believe in nailing you to the inside of an oil drum and then throwing you into the sea. In fact, I’m sure if you compared them to their musical neighbours under any other circumstances, AOAA would fucking break your skull open. AOAA’s grunting death rumbles, and the imposing demands of frontman Steve Regan, are eventually rewarded when the now-packed North London venue becomes a swaying, grunting pit of limbs.

Born of Osiris prove to be the only truly flawed link in tonight’s agenda of extreme bruisers. Joe Buras’s keyboards are far too prominent, pushing in front of the band’s crunching guitar stabs like a pushy toddler desperate to show off to her favourite uncle. The Chicago 6-pieces usual tech-precision feels masked and muted, and despite the ravenous enthusiasm from their fans, Music Towers can’t help but feel unimpressed.

Abigail Williams don’t look like a black metal band. They’re from Phoenix, Arizona, rather than Oslo, Norway. They look more like a gang of OC metalcore-types, rather than a coven of corpse paint-covered church burners. If you give a shit about either of those things, then you haven’t been paying attention to the shit that matters – because Abigail Williams sound like Satan’s backing band. Unlike the smothering effect the keyboards had for Born of Osiris, here they merely bolster the huge sweeping guitar lines, adding an epic edge to their feral barrage of high speed riffs and murderous drum assaults.