The Starlight theater was alive on Sunday night with the sounds of tourmates Soundgarden and Dillinger Escape Plan.

While a pairing of classic grunge rockers and contemporary metal (read mathcore) seems odd, in the case of Soundgarden and Dillinger Escape Plan, it’s quite a complimentary contrast. Dillinger performs with an incredible amount of energy and uses every inch of stage that they can, including the vertical. With ushers and assigned seating, Starlight isn’t your typical, heavy metal music venue– but they still more than made the best of it, and as such were a great choice of opener to contrast Soundgarden’s less raucous, more deliberate live performance.

Full dark had set in on the near-capacity crowd by the time Soundgarden took the stage, making their intense, backlit stage-lighting all the more effective and entertaining. While they’re one of my all-time favorite bands, they’re not known for a high energy stage performance, so the lighting set ups they make use of are incredible; especially so when you find yourself stuck watching the show toward the back-end of a packed venue (and packed this venue was).