CASS Cafe Metal Video Showcase (Part 4)

It's time for our final CASS Cafe Video Showcase, and though it's probably a month later than it should have been, we're ending with a slightly smaller post than the other three, but there's some pretty cool and talented performances here to end with in our look back at videos from Central Algoma Secondary School's student concert series! For reference, click here, here, and here for the first three installments in this short series. To close, we have three more CASS Cafe videos from recent years to share, so check these out if you wanna!

Going in chronological order, we'll start with this May 2008 performance by 5 then-CASS students as they covered Children of Bodom's "Bed of Razors"! Filmed by Durera guitarist A.J. Biron and uploaded to his YouTube channel shortly afterwards, this unnamed band consists of guitarists Alex Pierce & Andy Turbin, bassist Tom Leindecker, drummer Mike Christie (a regular in a few of the other CASS Cafe videos we've shared) and keyboardist Benn Garside (now known as Late & Loud's bassist.) I'm not familiar with most of these musicians, but they handle this song well for the most part! Filmed on the CASS Cafe stage during practice for the full performance, they know this song pretty well, and Alex's guitar work especially is really good, but vocals would have helped, and the camera angles are weird and jumpy, with members often cut off or shot from behind (or in Benn's case, not even really seen on camera.) I'm glad A.J. posted this video though, as these five musicians sound good together, and it'd be cool to hear more from the majority of these guys musically! Check out their cover of "Bed of Razors" below!



Also new from A.J.'s YouTube channel is this video from December 2009 of four future members of local metal quartet Crimson Crusade at a CASS Cafe set! Featuring most of their current lineup (with ex-guitarist Brent Beaulieu in Brock Pinder's place), it's of their cover of Judas Priest's "Living After Midnight" (which has survived into recent Crimson Crusade setlists), and it's a hit and miss performance from what I can see. My main gripe is Devon Lucier's vocals, which sound forced and not well suited to this song, but I hope things have adjusted to flow better with this song since. Other than that, the cover is pretty well played, if a bit reserved, but check out this proto-version of Crimson Crusade covering Judas Priest in 2009 below!


Finally, we'll close this series where we started, with local death metal quintet For All That Is Lost's CASS Cafe set circa April 2010! We already featured a 1:54 clip from this performance via Chrissy Paetzold's YouTube channel, but another filmer was present at this show, and they filmed their entire two song set that day, including the first song that I still can't place a name for, followed by an early version of their original song "Viscosity of Blood"! The video quality is higher than on the other video, and this early F.A.T.I.L. incarnation (including original guitarists Allen Piche & Graeme Caughill) sound good and promising, but unfortunately, this video is only on the band's MySpace page. Solid stuff though, so check the above links for more, watch this video below, and stay tuned for more F.A.T.I.L. videos from their MySpace page next week!