Live Review: Ice Nine Kills – The Silver Stream

With many stuck inside this Halloween, due to the current pandemic, horror metalcore outfit Ice Nine Kills’ decision to host a livestream couldn’t have come at a better time. The stream came alongside the band’s new live album ‘I Heard They Kill Live!’ and featured a show recorded in November of 2019, in the band’s hometown at the The Worcester Palladium.

It was nice to see Ice Nine Kills taking a different approach to livestreaming than previous bands I’ve watched. The band set up a storyline around the show’s performance, getting on board cult classic horror film actor Bill Moseley to join along. The storyline revolved around the idea that Bill was hosting the stream and asking questions to the band members, via a zoom like meeting call. Bill asks frontman Spencer about a fan who recently broke into his house. Slowly over the night each member of the call experiences apparent “technical issues” happening to the phone call. Each time another member of the call is killed by a masked figure. This storyline was interlaced between clips from the 2019 hometown show.

It’s great to see the band taking advantage of the fact they were live streaming by putting on a horror themed story about the technical issues that people experienced from streams and zoom calls alike, however the technical issues were a bit too real for me and some others it seems. From looking in the chat, experiences from the website they used varied. For me no images loaded, and before the stream started, the page kept reloading jarringly. After the stream, when I tried to go back to view the VOD, the VOD simply didn’t load. In the end, I managed to get the website to load properly (with the images and VOD) by downloading and using VPN. This was simply a terrible experience, and I wasn’t alone experiencing these issues.

The broken website.

The working website.

Moving past all the technical issues once the stream was playing, it went smoothly with no other issues. The performance from the 2019 hometown show had great camera angles and sounded great as well (this is the same performance that can be heard on the band’s new live album ‘I Heard They Kill Live!’). The fact that this was a pre-recorded show didn’t take away from the energy from the performance, this was probably in part because of the excellent mix on the sound, although the interlaced storylines bits did break that energy up from time to time. If you’ve seen an Ice Nine Kills show before this stream didn’t feel much different.

When streaming back an already recorded show, you normally miss that interaction with the people watching live, I think it’s always good to try and involve the audience watching by answering their questions and such. While Ice Nine Kills stream did not get viewers to ask questions, the stream did allow fans who purchased “RIP” tickets to appear on screen while the performance was going on. It was great to see all these other fans rocking out along to the show. A killer stream overall.