Periphery’s Juggernaut tour came to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida at Revolution Live, with the line-up of Periphery, Nothing More, Wovenwar, and Thank You Scientist. Unfortunately, due to some van troubles, Thank You Scientist was unable to make the show.

Wovenwar started off the show properly at 7:30, firing on all cylinders and delivering exactly what you want from a great opener. They delivered six songs off their debut, self-titled album like a harmonized wall of sound that was both aggressive and crisp, featuring blistering, note-perfect leads from their triple guitar assault.That’s not to take away from their thundering rhythm section that leaves you feeling like you got kicked in the chest, in the best possible way of course. On a semi-related note, their drummer Jordan Mancino has some of the best facal hair in metal.

Full set list:
Foreward
1. All Rise
2. Death to Rights
3. The Mason
4. Tempest
5. Matter of Time
6. Prophets

I’m not sure what exactly I was expecting from Nothing More, and I’m going to try and maintain some sort of journalistic integrity rather than go on the caps locked block of expletive laden text praise that mirrored what was going through my mind during their set. Maybe it was because I went in with zero expectations that I stood there awestruck, or maybe it was the borderline psychotic energy from the first few seconds of their singer running on stage, jumping on his own personal drum set, finishing the intro on the drummer’s crash and then climbing on top of his own set. He did a lot of climbing during the show: his drum set, risers, stage monitors, etc. Aside from the singer’s drumming, the band’s drummer was practically a self contained thunderstorm of his own. Have you ever seen three people play one bass guitar with two playing the frets and one playing it like a xylophone with mallets? You’re now aware that you are missing something in your life and you need to remedy that. You’re welcome. Have you ever seen a metal band go full Blue Man Group and have all four members drumming mid song? You’re going to need to fix that too. I could go on, but I’ve already covered three songs of their nine song set. If you’re on the fence about going to see this tour and don’t know of these guys, or at least kind of like their studio work, they are well worth the ticket price to see.

Set list:
Pyre
1. Christ Copyright
2. Sex & Lies
3. Mr. MTV
4. Jenny
5. The Matthew Effect
6. Dirge
7. Fell in Love With a Ghost
8. Salem (Burn the Witch)
9. This is the Time (Ballast)

Now is the time for what is probably going to be an unpopular opinion. I was really disappointed with seeing Periphery live. There was so much wrong with this show in my eyes, and ears, that detracted from the whole experience. To be fair, I am willing to concede on a few things for the sake that I am not perfect, but there were many small things overall rather than one overarching problem. First of all is the most understandable, and that was that singer Spencer Sotelo had come down with strep throat, and that some of the songs would be played as intrumentals. That’s understandable, sickness cannot be helped, and to be fair he still sounded great on the songs he did sing on. Periphery also has complex and interesting enough instrumentation that their songs make good instrumentals. My problem however was in the overall sound engineering. While I am willing to chalk some of this up to where I may have been standing, I specifically choose spots near the sound booth to avoid these issues. Spencer’s vocals were consistently low, as well as many of the lead parts that would have been necessary to make the songs as instrumentals acceptable because I don’t know how much you listen to intrumental djent, but it gets repetitive if you can’t hear the leads. The next annoyance was the light show. I love lights, lazers, and strobes as much as the next concert junkie, but not when they’re so frequent that you cannot look at the stage for a large portion of the concert that  you find yourself looking at the backs of heads of people also avoiding looking directly into the light. Maybe that makes me weak, but I say that I’m not at an EDM show, I want to actually watch the artists on stage. That could also have been dependent on where I was standing, but that excuse really can’t work for everything when the other bands looked and sounded great. My last issue is kind of a selfish one, but I was upset that they played neither of my favorite songs, “Scarlet” and “The Parade of Ashes.” They played “Scarlet” at a previous date, so did I miss it? I wouldn’t have missed that main riff, so either they did not play their biggest song, or their sound was that bad that the distinguishing characteristics of it were completely unrecognizable since there were no vocals. Regardless of the rest of the show, it was exceeding entertaining to watch Matt Halpern behind the drum kit. With such precision, he makes it not only look easy, but very, very fun. So while I did hear the pleased remarks of passersby, I also heard complaints of disappointment. Either way I still had a pleasant time and imagine once Spencer is back to 100% the show being much smoother.

Set list:
1. Icarus Lives!
2. Make Total Destroy
3. The Scourge
4. Psychosphere
5. Ji
6. The Bad Things
7. Alpha
8. Graveless
9. Scarlet
Encore
10. Ragnarok
11. Masamune

Other comments:

There was a person dressed as Gumby. Yes, that Gumby. He was crowd surfing, taking pictures with people in the crowd, and drinking beer from a straw.

There were a ton of people with e-cigs/vaporizers, I don’t know if it’s a Florida thing, or if people are bringing these portable cloud factories (they made big clouds) to concerts because I have never seen them that prevalent at a concert before. I don’t mind it, they had pleasant smelling flavors.

*All set lists taken from a previous show on the tour posted on Setlist.fm