words & photos: Daniel Hanssen @danthegigman

Review

*“..the festival which gathers energy through a rarely celebrated scene can pat itself on the back for putting together such a worthwhile iteration..”*

To any Australian who relishes the heavy-metalcore or hardcore music scenes, last weekend’s Unify Gathering was the most important day on the music calendar. It was an interesting weekend with the weather playing a large role in the happenings over the three main days.

Thursday night’s warm-up was the perfect lead into a weekend bursting with talent with a swath of pop-punk band’s lighting up the stage for the evening. Firstly though, attendees had to fight against the wind to set-up their camping sites but it bred a sense of camaraderie into fellow campers, everyone working together to get their sites ready for a big weekend.

What followed was a night perfectly sculpted line-up for the pop-punk lover with Terra, Bad/Love, Gloom In The Corner, Honest Crooks and Windwaker. Unfortunately for Gloom In The Corner, there were electrical issues on the stage cutting down on their time to perform to the crowd, but they brought it hard and the crowd reciprocated with crowd-surfers constantly flowing over the barricade to amp up the overall feel in the tent.

Windwaker was the overall highlight for the evening with a full hour set of an energetic crowd excited for what the rest of the weekend would bring.

Friday served up some less than appetising weather, tearing tents and pulling gazebos from the ground in what turned into a psuedo-windstorm. This put a delay on the bands, seeing the day start in the early evening to wait for the weather to stop. This, of course, meant that many of the attendees had to find a way to entertain themselves in the camp making use of the BYO nature of the festival to keep themselves jovial.

One of the highlights of the day was the ‘stick-jousting’ put on by the General Admission campsite. It turned into a tournament with many participants taking part in the competition to pass the time while everyone waited out the rain. Thankfully, the organisers changed the schedule to accommodate most of the band’s allowing them to play on the second tent stage and moving those they couldn’t fit into the mega-Saturday lineup. Of course, this still meant a stacked Friday roster including bands such as Dear Seattle, Tired Lion, Silverstein and Antagonist AD. This left band’s such as Northlane and Make Them Suffer a part of the Saturday roster.

The Friday night was capped off with the majesty of Architects, the UK outfit; who was almost rained out, quelled the confusion of the crowd, who throughout the day was a little lost with major scheduling changes based on the weather. The setlist was heavy on newer tracks from Holy Hell, the groups 2018 album release as tracks “Doomsday”, “Hereafter”, “Death Is Not Defeat” and “A Match Made In Heaven” rained down from the now open main stage to finish off the shortened day.

Saturday copped the brunt of the cancellations from the previous day, but the organisers still managed to fit in all of the band’s who had originally been rostered in to appear the day before. This meant the heavy hitters of the festival, such as Tonight Alive, Polaris, Northlane and The Ghost Inside all lined off to finish Unify Gathering 2020 off in style. Of course, Void Of Vision, Kublai Khan TX, Knocked Loose and Stray From The Path warmed up the main stage crowd before the bigger artists took hold fornn a full day of non-stop pit action.

Polaris and Northlane brought the Australian metalcore to the forefront of the stage before the finale, powering through some invigorating hits of their albums and stirring up some of the wildest circle pits the festival had seen thus far. Polaris had an especially wild pit, with lead screamer Jamie Hails constantly egging the crowd on to make more excessive pits.

The Ghost Inside closed out the entire line-up newly returned after a horror tour bus crash four years ago, Jonathon Vigil and Co. returned with a renewed vigour and outlook on life with nearly all of the members scarred from the crash. Their setlist was a behemoth of production and sound with Jonathon vocals not seeming to have lost a beat in the crews time away from touring.

Their seventy-minute long set was stacked with tracks from their discography seeing top tracks such as “Engine 45”, “Dark Horse”, “Move Me” and “Dear Youth (Day 52)” all move the crowd. Yet, it wasn’t just the music that managed to move the crowd, never before has a band seen such respect from a crowd; as Vigil looked back on the crash and the experiences that have borne from it, the crowd, without prompt sat down to listen, struggling to tear their ears from the tale that Vigil weaved on stage alongside bassist Jim Riley. This was followed by the revelation that both Polaris and Northlane turned down the scales of their set production to push The Ghost Inside’s set as the most exciting of the night, raising a round of applause from the crowd.

While the weather heavily affected the outcomes of the weekend, UNIFY Gathering 2020 managed to take the punches in its stride with organisers still managing to let fans see all of the bands while keeping the revellers safe throughout the duration of the festival. Both the line-up and food was worth the wait and the festival which gathers energy through a rarely celebrated scene can pat itself on the back for putting together such a worthwhile iteration.