Nearly two hours after the scheduled opening time, the frozen audience slowly shuffled inside, many of whom had to be turned away due to over capacity, even though 14 year olds were being let in despite it being a 16+ show and the ferryboat becoming supposedly stricter on its restrictions. And worse still, the music wasn’t great either.

This is Colour start the night off with a set of well-played, yet fairly generic metalcore set to the likes of Misery Signals. They are good enough, and show good potential, but right now and nothing special, which is the case for most of the night.

Submerged can be barely heard due to bad sound levels, (and possibly because of the squeaky girls, and the fact I was standing behind some BIG haircuts.), not that it really takes away from a bad performance. From a band who used to have good promise, since getting new vocalist and half of Norwich’s youth on their side, things seem to have gone a bit downhill. In fact, I don’t think they ever got off the open C chord.

If Fire Would Fall prove to have the greatest melody and sound levels of the night, and also manage to sound slightly different, but they again are very average, at times sounding like a metal version of Meat Loaf.

Deadsoil next, and despite being the only non-local support tonight, they engage in another set of generic music, so much in fact that you can actually recognise the band they’re ripping off per song. They essentially end up sounding like a dodgy cover band with lots of, wait for it… “BREAKDOWNS! Grr.” The vocalist was a bit Aryan as well.

The Black Dahlia Murder however put an end to all these absurdities and play a decent set! What we’ve all been waiting for! Yay! Despite awful sound levels at first, they show just why they’re the band who actually has managed to find some success, because they are amazing at their blend of hardcore, death and black metal, and this set shows exactly why. They rip through their set with excellent precision and confidence, and by some margin show why they are the best band of the night. And just to further prove this endurance test of a night, they played their arguably best song, ‘Funeral Thirst’ last. It is well worth the wait though, as that song, along with BDM’s whole set was excellent; let alone the amount of humour that could be found for the average critic to dig out from tonight.

And thus, the end of a very bizarre night. The bands sounded like Converge, The crowd weren’t sure whether to headbang, mosh, hardcore dance or try and “pull that fit 17 year old sitting at the bar”, but at least BDM were worth the wait, and the myspace points, it seems.