If there's a ray of light from the dark side of Canadian metal, it is cast by The Agonist. A shaft is now aimed through the smoke and thunderclouds at Prince George.
The Montreal five-piece is one of the world's leading practitioners of clean-and-growl vocals and also one of the vanguard bands for female lead vocalists in the death-metal genre. Frontwoman Vicky Psarakis can sing a sleek power-rock lyric but then seemingly without effort shift to a melodic screamspeak that seems to emanate from thoracic caves, slashing through sheets of pericardium to escape her chest.
The band roars and rages to the satisfaction of the veteran metal fan, but they are credited with being one of the most accessible metal bands to the uninitiated ear. They don't dumb anything down or filter anything out, but they have a knack for striking a balance. It makes them a sort of aggressive ambassador for attracting and retaining new metal fans.
In a nation filthy, stinking wealthy in metal of all sorts, it is difficult to rise to the upper echelons, but The Agonist has done so. The Top 10 List website MsMojo put the group among the Top 15 in the world for metal bands featuring female vocalists (they also put former vocalist Alissa White-Gluz at No. 2 in the world via her band Arch Enemy, so really The Agonist gets acclaimed twice).
The crowd-source pollster website Ranker collected votes from the cyberworld on Canadian metal bands and The Agonist scored the No. 71 position. This was a poll for all forms of metal and for all time, so they were up against less metallic acts like Bootsauce or D.O.A. or Nickelback. They nonetheless scored even higher than seminal acts like Gorguts and Devin Townsend.
According to the Canadian news aggregator and e-zine Metal Underground, a website dedicated to the metal genre and listing 919 metal acts from coast to coast, The Agonist is one of the most high-profile bands that metal has. The website keeps count of media articles for the known metal bands. The top act in the country, Kataklysm, has 382 articles to their name. Three Inches of Blood has 261, Kittie has 185, Into Eternity has 180 and Voivod has 155 to round out the Top 5. Only 15 in Canada have 100 articles each or more. The Agonist, with 114, is in the Top 13 in the nation.
For context, some of the most commercially successful metal bands in Canadian history, Helix and Alexisonfire, got 33 and 26 respectively on the Metal Underground list.
The Agonist has a 12-year, five-album (first three with White-Gluz, latter two with Psarakis) history and they have been to Prince George before. They return on Aug. 24 to storm the stage at The Legion along with opening acts Drop Dead Fred (from Kelowna) and Tombstone (from Williams Lake). Showtime is 8 p.m.
Tickets are available online (click the link at The Agonist At The Legion event page on Facebook or at Electron Sound & Percussion).
