LIVE REVIEW: Vexed @ The Joiners, Southampton

For nearly six decades, grassroots venue The Joiners has hosted some of the south coast’s best shows, becoming a scene favourite for the kind of nights that leave you sweaty, breathless and at times a bit bruised, but most of all full of adrenaline after an evening of riffs. Put three bands built around down-tuned guitars, breakdowns and varying shades of modern metal into this infamous room and there is even less space for the music, or the crowd, to escape. For a short headline run this September, VEXED bring THE FIVE HUNDRED and ESCHALON to Southampton for a bill firmly within the heavier corners of the UK scene.

ESCHALON are a fast-emerging tech-metalcore outfit whose recent material suggests little interest in easing anybody into proceedings. Last year’s release DEVOUR sounds massive live, with tracks like Zealot pairing pulsing grooves with venomous vocals. While the music’s attack on blind allegiance, inherited belief and unquestioned dogma gives it confrontational intent, heads across the crowd rock back and forth in unison as the band rip through the sound system. Bigger than their Thursday night opening slot suggests, ESCHALON sow seeds, sprout vines and begin winding themselves around The Joiners’ foundations in just 20 minutes, sowing the seeds for something bigger to bloom.

Rating: 8/10

THE FIVE HUNDRED arrive following last year’s Ghostwriter, an ambitious third album building its industrial, dystopian world through gritty textures, electronics and giant breakdowns. That dramatic scale loses little in the transition to the stage, with THE FIVE HUNDRED pushing through their set with urgency. Frontman John Eley repeatedly takes to a riser at the stage’s edge, looming over a crowd being pulled further into their orbit.

On record, Ghostwriter builds its ruined city through layers of production, but tonight THE FIVE HUNDRED do it with considerably fewer tools. That precision remains, but everything feels sweatier, scrappier and more immediate, with every breakdown threatening to swallow the floor beneath them.

Rating: 7/10

By the time VEXED take to the stage, The Joiners is suitably packed. Vertical strips of light give the stage deceptive scale while Megan Targett commands its centre, colossal gutturals interrupted only to conduct the crowd with seemingly little effort. Hands shoot into the air at her command, while the band behind her deliver the sort of punishing, tightly controlled performance their reputation has been built on.

Yet for all the aggression VEXED throw around, there has always been something considerably more vulnerable underneath it. It’s Not The End perhaps captures that contradiction best. Speaking around the release of its music video in 2024, Targett explains how “the grieving process knows no concept of time”, describing a song written around the pain, loneliness and beautiful memories left behind when somebody dies. Two years later, those feelings still sit comfortably amongst some of the most ferocious material in the set. VEXED might package pain in crushing riffs and gutturals, but they never disguise where it comes from.

As VEXED tear through material from 2023’s Negative Energy, a sea of hair whips back and forth, creating a synergy between stage and floor. The audience is not saturated with phones recording, nor distracted by chatter between songs, but instead gripped by the kind of attention that becomes tangible across the venue.

There is something particularly effective about VEXED in this setting; the tightly controlled nature of their sound feels less clinical when met with a crowd giving just as much back. In a room as unforgiving as The Joiners, there is little opportunity to hide behind production or scale, and tonight that works firmly in their favour.

Long-standing highlight Anti-Fetish boasts the precision holding all of VEXED’s chaos together, polished enough to satisfy in its live delivery without sanitising the bite that makes it so effective in the first place. This allure is mirrored in a standout moment during Hideous, as blasting cymbals and harsh guitar tones send the crowd parting before they erupt into a flurry of flying limbs. The set concludes as proof that brutality and vulnerability needn’t exist at opposite ends of the spectrum; for VEXED, one increasingly seems to sharpen the other.

Rating: 8/10

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