Kissing Candice

Live at Mayhem Festival

San Bernardino, California

June 27th, 2015

Review and Photos by Travis Baumann

Kissing Candice are a "Gorecore" band out of Long Island, New York. They are basically Metalcore in style with extreme vocals for most of the verse and then melodic vocals for the chorus.

The Gore comes from their costumes which take a page from Slipknot's book in that they are all masked and the lead singer covered in blood as well.

Kissing Candice played the Victory Records stage between The Devil Wears Prada and Hellyeah over on the main stage. They literally started the moment the former stopped and the latter started the moment they ended which made it difficult to go back and forth between the main stage and the second stage, so the crowd was a bit sparse, especially right when they started.

They were highly theatrical with the lead singer looking like some sort of burn victim mental patient, androgynous in a bloody hospital gown. The melodic vocals were sung by a big hillbilly guy in overalls and a flannel, wearing a burlap mask with a zipper mouth.

They had a drummer wearing a conventional gas mask and then a bassist and an additional guitarist (the hillbilly played guitar as well as sang) each wearing a stylized mask and underlying makeup.

They were pretty decent and definitely brought the most to the Victory stage in terms of stage presence and props. These guys are entertaining live and went over well with the Slipknot fans for sure but the timing of the acts on the second stage once the main stage bands started was a bit off as it is a big trek from one stage to the other and there was no downtime so you are definitely missing something from one or more of the performances if you go back and forth.

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