Electric Callboy, Ice Nine Kills @ Entertainment Centre, Adelaide 6/9/2026
In the current climate of doom, gloom and financial pressures, the perfect antidote of magic, metal and murder arrived in town. A potion concocted that includes fantasy, fire and fear, delighted the Adelaide crowd, casting a spell that made all forget that tonight is, in fact, Sunday.
Electric Callboy and Ice Nine Kills. Expect more costumes changes than a Mariah Carey show. Expect dancing queens and metal moshers. Expect the unexpected.
An audience dressed in neon tracksuits and horror paraphernalia, or is that neon horror, chatter excitedly about what is to come. Ice Nine Kills last tortured us with Amity Affliction in 2024 while Electric Callboy pumped out a show for the ages even further back than that.
We will start with Ice Nine Kills. A vaudeville horror extravaganza that leans into classic horror with modern rock metalcore their soundtrack. Dressed in matching American Psycho outfits, they channel Freddy, Hannibal and The Joker with mock murder on stage, a cinematic backdrop and metalcore you can sing too.
They sound huge, too big for a support act. With nods to the classic shock rocker Alice Cooper, singer Spencer Charnas has the crowd working for him like a madman telling his disciples his next fiendish move. That next fiendish move is Alex Reade from Make Them Suffer lending vocals while Art The Clown from the Terrifier movies, swings a newborn baby by the umbilical cord around the stage. Wow. I think I can’t write about that however my friend, known as Mike’s Shinido’s hat, said I must. And to be fair, they are right. It’s so over the top, so much in the horror fantasy realm you can only laugh, switch off your mind, let go and enjoy the theatre of it all.
Which makes them the perfect warm up act for the headliners. This isn’t Tool or Eddie Van Halen, this is pure unadulterated fun. It’s Electric Callboy and it’s time to Pump It.
Every show from the band is raucous, sweaty, childlike fun. Forget what you look like, just lose yourself in the music and you’re guaranteed to leave with a smile on your face. The perfect cure to life’s blues.
Opening with two tracks from the new album, ‘Tanznied’ and ‘Still Waiting’, the band sound bombastic, charged and an adrenaline hit to the heart.
Smoke, multi coloured flames, ticker tape, streamers and the Backstreet Boys all overload your senses. The crowd singing in Hypa Hypa, the drop in Pump It, the DJ techno sounds in All The Small Things, all pummelling and taking over you in the way drugs get you high. Blissful, otherworldly and in the moment.
Sure, there’s the choreographed dance moves and costumes changes, you’d be dissatisfied if there wasn’t, however the band mange to capture that wonderful feeling that this is an intimate show for one night only.
That intimacy reaches new levels during the Backstreet Boys I Want It That Way and The Way Your Are before any energy you had left was poured out of you in sweat and smiles.
Everytime We Touch is a sea of arms waving, RATATATA is a whoop-whoop delicious slab of celebration and the finale of We Got The Moves, the perfect opener to our upcoming summer season.
Electric Callboy, and Ice Nine Kills, sweated, slayed and stormed Adelaide tonight. A festival of light, colour, blood, gore , fantasy and anthems. Tonight, will go down in history as a core memory for some, and others a chance to escape harsh life. The power of music rules.
Work tomorrow? I don’t think so, because ‘we are young, and we are free, sipping on booze on a sunny beach…’
Live Review By Iain McCallum