Author: Rok Klemše
Venue: Menza pri koritu, Ljubljana
Concert date: December 7, 2011
Attendance: 150
Norwegian heralds of evil Gorgoroth rolled back into Ljubljana, with Polish death metal machine Vader in tow. Neither band is a stranger to Slovenian stages, and together they made a properly blasphemous kickoff to the season when we get force-fed Bela snežinka, Na božično noč and Last Christmas. The crowd agreed, turning up in numbers that nearly filled Menza pri koritu.
First, though, we had to fight our way through the thorns and endure a merciless assault on our eardrums from, lo and behold, Italian bands again (oh, how I hate the pay to play system!). The ear-shredding duties fell first to Aganis, who even before the show started were up on stage performing some private quasi-ritual with incense sticks and skulls. They were probably just messing around with an ouija board, and the moment the floorboards creaked on the stairs they ran off to hide under mama’s skirt. Their music felt just as jittery: in the first track they came across as orthodox black metallers, in the second they wanted to sound like pagan metal, and in the third like doomers. And all of it was completely unlistenable, like Windows Media Player had lost its mind and crammed Marduk, Count Raven and Tyr into a single song.
Things didn’t get much better with Adimiron, who introduced themselves to Slovenian audiences back in March this year as openers for Death Angel. Thrash and Italy don’t exactly get along, so from that angle Adimiron even surprised me a little. In just under half an hour, the guys laid out their vision of thrash metal, which doesn’t deviate in the slightest from the guidelines of the genre set down back in 1983. What’s more, Adimiron even bill themselves as a progressive thrash metal band. What exactly was progressive about their music is beyond me; one or two slightly more complex riffs and a few broken rhythms don’t make you progressive. A few guitar lines were actually a nice surprise, and the vocalist wasn’t bad either, though his aggressive thrasher vocals were nowhere near unique. But for an Italian thrash metal band, Adimiron were actually pretty solid.
The real show finally kicked off when the lights went out and the intro Ultima Thule thundered from the speakers. You didn’t even need the muffled breathing to know what was coming. Vader. The Polish death metal beast, who have been sowing their vision of devastating death metal across the world for a quarter of a century, mercilessly and without ever stopping, led by the unstoppable Piotr “Peter” Wiwczarek. This past summer Vader released their ninth studio album, Welcome to the Morbid Reich, which is without a doubt one of the strongest releases in their discography and was the centerpiece of this show. Peter has once again gathered a fresh lineup around him, and it’s so confident and tight you’d think they’d been playing together since the debut The Ultimate Incantation. Peter commands the crew like a grand leader, and with his roaring vocals, which haven’t lost a bit of their edge, he slams religion and war and invites us into the realms of darkness and tentacled Lovecraftian creatures. Those tentacles caress you gently, but it’s all a nice trick: they grab you and drag you into a demonic world, whispering “we have such sight to show you” while they violate every orifice imaginable, and Vader provide the fantastic “soundtrack” to this agony with tectonic crushers like Sothis, Wings, The Wrath and Cold Demons. Peter has put together a truly top-notch crew this time, as proven by drummer James Stewart with his bestially brutal and surgically precise drumming, and new guitarist Spider (Marek Pajak), who shone with excellent soloing and good ideas that bring even more variety and freshness to Vader. On top of that, he plays nicely off Peter’s relentless wanking of pinch harmonics and abuse of the tremolo. Vader took us through a stellar set all the way to the end with the classic Helleluyah!!! (God Is Dead), and thanks to the crowd’s great support they came back for an encore with the brutal masterpiece This Is the War. Si vis pacem, para bellum! Ave Vader!
Gorgoroth had a really tough job following the excellent Vader, though the pretty mixed crowd, who had come either for Gorgoroth or for Vader and only a few strictly for both bands, gave them some slack. Gorgoroth struck without mercy like a guillotine on Christians, and under the leadership of new/old vocalist Pest they strolled through their hellish discography in just under an hour. Sadly, the sound was complete garbage, so plastic and muffled it was as if Gorgoroth were being played to Ljudmila Novak, who was covering her ears with a “pillow” in a God-fearing panic and hiding under the blanket. The Norwegians were touring with the re-recorded classic album Under the Sign of Hell, and they played a nice number of classics from it. Pest screamed and snarled like Hades’ hellhound, and the crew under Infernus’s stern eye is tight and confident. Pest handled the in-between-song banter in a really original way… by announcing the title of the next track, and he looked really cool with a bald head he didn’t bother to hide behind corpse-paint. Gorgoroth raged through their set like infernal forces, charging ahead without mercy and without a hint of fatigue. Menza pri koritu glowed under the sign of hell through tracks like Forces of Satan Storms, Satan-Prometheus, Incipit Satan and the closing iron-clad classic Unchain My Heart!!! And then it was all over in under an hour. Gorgoroth could have shown some respect for the fans who gave them such a warm welcome by playing at least the advertised 70 minutes, which even Satan would approve of!
Photos: Nina Grad
Photo Gallery
