Temple of Night, Bloodless Child, Jinn Arcana, & What Remains @ Tail of the Junction (Dec 21, 2019)

     Last night was the Winter Solstice so I decided to celebrate with some killer local black metal! With an undying cold and savage bitterness, black metal is music for the frozen soul and provides the perfect soundtrack for such an occasion. Keeping true to the evil themes the bands also put on a food drive and unwrapped toy drive during the show to donate to local charities. I love metalheads... The show was at a small bar in the west end called Tail of the Junction, which is cool spot for a drink and catch some tunes. The bars unforgiving brick walls were excellent for the sound and set an appropriate backdrop for the mood.

     The night opened with Totonto's What Remains, as they rocked out with some high energy tunes and some wicked proggy guitar parts. They had a lot of spunk and delivered some quality jams. Next up was Jinn Arcana who almost gave the bartender a god damn heart attack when they opened their set with a 3 minute prayer to the dark gods complete with hoods, skulls, the satanic bible, a dagger, and the ominous chime of the cymbals from the bands drummer. Jinn Arcana play some down tempo raw as hell material laced with moments of dank unholy grimness.

     Things cranked up a notch as Bloodless Child from London, Ontario set up and unleashed their blackened death metal madness on the group of gathering metalheads and bar patrons just trying to watch the hockey game... They played as a trio for the show with one insane drummer and two guitar leads. They were relentless with brutal riffing and kicked some serious ass! The ambulance flying by at high speeds during their set synced up a little too well.

     Temple of Night were my main reason for coming out to this show. They are an emerging black metal band from Niagara Falls who play an insidious mix of atmospheric and symphonic black metal with a more traditional tone in their song structure and overall aesthetics. They opened with their single "Secret Lord of All" and followed it up with two songs that I was hearing the first time. Temple of Night were absolutely dialed instrumentally and they had incredible stage presence with enough fog and cloaked corpses to make a graveyard jealous. On top of the swarming guitars and devastating and complex drumming, the vocal range provided is impressive with savage growls and shrieks backed up by live orchestral vocals from the keyboardist. Where so many bands would go the route of backtracks, Temple of Night show what they are made of and give the full live experience. The set was short with the band still gearing up towards a launch off demo or EP hopefully in the near future. In the meantime enjoy some of their tunes below and check out a few photos from the night! Cheers to all the bands that played and all the metalheads who came out to celebrate the longest night of the year!

Temple of Night

Bloodless Child

Jinn Arcana

What Remains

-Metal Yeti /../;,,;/../