Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Graz / Explosiv / Austria
Concert date: 24.03.2018
Attendance: 350
Ticket price: €34.00
Three weeks after we feasted on a show by the mighty Sepulture, who are going through an artistic reawakening in these new times, another excuse to revisit Graz’s Explosiv came along: Venom Inc., Suffocation, Nervosa, Aeternam and Survive. Five bands with wildly different characters, in other words. Tempting, no doubt about it!
Who would have thought you could one day hear, on the same stage in the same evening, a band considered pioneers of the N.W.O.B.H.M. boom and a band that broke new ground for technical death metal? A hugely fitting and interesting combination. Still, most of the crowd that came to this concert spectacle belonged to the generation of metal fans around thirty and a bit older. So, tastes leaning toward the extreme end of metal’s spectrum, which in this case means death metal!
First on stage, around half past seven in the evening, were the Japanese band Survive. The quartet hones a mix of death metal with thrash elements, with vocals handled by singer and guitarist Nemo and bassist Sinjilow, while guitarist Gaku and drummer Shintarou round out the lineup. The Japanese, who have been active since 1998, a solid twenty years now, still show remarkable stage commitment after two decades, sharp focus and a high level of dedication to everything they do. They play with plenty of zeal and passion. Survive got very decent sound conditions and delivered an optimal, well-rehearsed and compact set, which ran for just over half an hour. Although the band doesn’t bring anything new or unheard-of, at moments the songs edge close to metalcore tunes, and clear melodic passages aren’t lacking either. A technically extremely well-equipped group. The band warmed up the crowd really well at the start, with four more bands still to come. »Human Misery« is the group’s sixth album overall and the current one; the band gave it more promotion, with »Dean« guitars, a polished sound, a very tightly coordinated four-piece that can unleash serious speed. Maybe it’s precisely this fashionable aesthetic that at moments seems inspired by metalcore of the Trivium type. Survive were also helped through this show by drummer Antoine Guerrin, whom the Canadians Aeternam lent them.
Aeternam were up next. The Canadians are a band almost ten years younger than Survive. They have three studio albums under their belt, the latest of which, »Ruins Of Empires«, came out last year. Aeternam are also a fun addition to a show, especially when you go to a gig with a »expect the unexpected« mindset. Their stylistic starting point is death metal, but with a good dose of pomp and bombast. The band weaves passages built from Oriental motifs into its music in a pronounced way, and even works the sound of traditional Moroccan instruments into the arrangements, which gives them a »folk« flavor too. Frontman Achraf Loudiy, who also handles rhythm guitar, has a hugely likable growl, occasionally mixed with clean singing. Bassist Maxime Boucher gave him some backing vocal support now and then. Babylon, Mesopotamia and Egypt came to life. No surprise there, since Achraf is originally Moroccan, so it’s clear where such ideas come from, as he’s the band’s main songwriter. Aeternam don’t shy away from sprinkling in the occasional blastbeat salvo, either, which they use to riddle individual passages. The hugely atmospheric and fiery performance was accompanied by orchestration backing tracks. The band offered a mixed selection of material from all three albums, running through Damascus Gate, The Coronation of Seth, Praetor of Mercury, Sun Shield, Fallen Is the Simulacrum of Bel, Hubal, Profaner Of Light, Paropamisadae, Goddess of Masr and Angel Horned. Aeternam sound a bit different, even though quite a few of their peers are already taking similar approaches. Live, though, the band is right at home next to acts like Orphaned Land and Melechesh.
Nervosa are three fired-up Brazilian women from Sao Paolo, with three albums to their name. We first met the band in 2015, when the girls played at Metaldays festival in Tolmin. Even back then they won us over with an extremely confident and charismatic show, overflowing with seething energy and fire. This time was no different. ŠEven more so. The band is more mature and comes across even more convincing in its stage performances. Although musically they aren’t discovering Einstein’s theory of relativity, Nervosa come across as definitely above average for an all-female band, or an all-female collective. They’re developing a version of a hugely fired-up, uncompromisingly crushing thrash metal revival (you can feel the Teutonic school’s influence) that knows no pause and no rest. The energetic singer and bassist Fernanda Lira ran around her half of the stage nonstop, fired off a whole constellation of grimaces, stuck her tongue out wildly left and right, and shot a few glares, dead stare and furious, straight into the crowd. The trio clicks together superbly. They delivered a huge dose of tightness and coordination, and alongside the main stage magnet, singer Fernanda, who hissed wildly with her furious vocal performance, guitarist and backing vocalist Prika Amaral provided solid support, while Nervosa would never have been so convincing without the furious Luana Dametto keeping watch behind the drums. The band already presented some material from the upcoming new studio album »Downfall of Mankind«, out this June. The brutal girls spat out salvos of rage and menace! An excellent performance in every respect.
And then came the show that drew the most attention of the night, from the American legends of technical death metal pioneering, Suffocation. Some three hundred people crammed in. Properly hardened and jagged ones. The temperature was also pushed up by some fans of heavy sounds who came from neighboring Croatia, and there were also a few »lost and forgotten« Slovenes (because we always travel separately to gigs abroad) from the Styria region. The band delivered another top-notch show, going all in, firing with every bit of artillery available and from every position. Given that Frank Mullen, the band’s lead throat, explained a few days ago that he’s leaving Suffocation permanently, meaning for an indefinite time, because of work commitments, the question now opens up whether the band will make the stand-in who has occasionally helped out live, now entering his fourth year of this kind of duty with Suffocation, the permanent replacement. That’s Disgorge drummer Ricky Myers, who again, with his piercing growl, delivered a hugely solid performance, worthy of filling Mullen’s shoes. The band is holding up extremely well despite going through quite a bundle of lineup shake-ups lately. This was confirmed once again by the superb drumming skill and performance of newcomer Eric Morotti, who joined the band two years ago as a replacement for the exceptional and in many ways hard-to-replace virtuoso »on the skins«, Mike Smith. Continuing in that vein, there’s one more fairly fresh member on the team. That’s Charles Errigo, who also first served the band as a temporary replacement for the overloaded Guy Marchais, but the guys recently made him part of the regular lineup. So alongside the only original member, Terrance Hobbs, who of course has lived through all the bad and good times with Suffocation, there’s bassist Derek Boyer, who has been rubbing the bass guitar in Suffocation since 2004. Last June the band released its eighth studio album overall, »…Of the Dark Light«, from which it played two songs, Return to the Abyss and Clarity Through Deprivation, which together with the not much older Pinnacle of Bedlam from the previous album successfully maintain the high-quality reputation and notoriety the band has earned over the years thanks to the breadth of its songwriting and its extreme, technically complex, brutal vistas, and which it still enjoys with its fans in its mature years.
The band couldn’t disappoint. The set list alone wouldn’t allow it. The band loaded its repertoire generously with material from its early era, firing off three classics from the debut »Effigy Of the Forgotten« (Liege of Inveracity, the title track and Infecting the Crypts), adding two tracks from the album »Pierced from Within« (the title track and Thrones of Blood) and throwing in two songs from the EP »Despise the Sun« (Catatonia, Funeral Inception). Madness. Hobbs is still incredible when he breaks loose and the energy grabs him completely and drags him into his world on stage. With the calm but hair-splittingly precise Errigo, the two clicked more than superbly. Boyer once again bassed his way through the show with his bass stood upright on the floor and almost leaning on it, pulling at the strings in his own style through the entire gig. The drumming is utterly crushing and remains one of the most interesting elements of this cult band’s image. It’s precisely this rhythmic looseness within the otherwise devastating energy of the compositions and structures that remains one of the main attractions of this old-guard Florida death metal fortress, which delivered a real reckoning with all the quasi-morality of the new era we’re enslaved to. Merciless and utterly »stretching«! Wrapped in abysses of evil and doom, from which there’s no return. The apocalypse is here. The band reaped extreme ovations from a satisfied (but not quite satisfied) »choked« crowd, but didn’t come back for an encore, even though the tour with Venom Inc. was supposedly co-headlining. They played exactly one hour of repertoire and with their outstanding show left the stage, where a starving crowd demanded more.
The forecasts were confirmed by the last act of the night. Quite a big chunk of the crowd didn’t return to the hall when three great veterans of their craft took the stage. Tony Dolan, Mantas and Abaddon. With a small correction. The latter had to skip this tour because of family obligations, and on the drum slot he was replaced by Jeramie Kling of The Absence. That they are not Venom Inc. Just one more version of Venom (the band under the original name is led by their (literally) former comrade Cronos), driven only by the urge for concert earnings, is disproved by the release of the new studio album »Ave«. It was solidly represented in the set. Between the opening new Ave Satanas and the no less new Metal We Bleed, the first classic, Welcome To Hell, was caught in the early part. Toward the end the band threw in the newer War and the Motörhead-ish Black’n’Roll, and otherwise rolled out one classic after another.
No need to say that the band possesses a timeless rock energy, which evidently infected all the true-believer musicians of the first metal generation when they entered the process of pioneering the creation of something that later became metal in music, and which flows through these musicians’ veins through all these years of defiance on the scene. Regardless of the fact that Venom’s discography is often used to mark the beginning of something that later developed into a new genre (black metal), that’s solely thanks to the album of that name, as well as Cronos’s guttural shouting, which in Venom Inc. is so successfully embodied, if not outright upgraded, by the insatiable madman Tony Dolan. With the mic on the stand pointed downward and a stance full of grimacing faces, The Demolition Man in many ways recalls Motörhead’s energetic pose. Dressed in “old school metal outfit”! The sound itself, which is utterly elemental and where the energy of blasphemous rock’n’roll »proto-mission« reigns, with unbridled contrasts of guitar, bass and drums, comes across as entirely primal and instantly bewitching. The band rolled out track after track. Mantas has become a very accomplished guitarist, and his often naive »tricks«, noted especially on the studio albums of Venom’s first era, have long been absolute ancient history.
Dolan talked to the crowd much less than he usually does, as was the case, e.g., at the band’s show at last year’s Metaldays festival, when the band came back out for as many as three encores. He evidently wasn’t motivated enough, as fewer and fewer people watched the show toward the end. With that, we were also deprived of a bunch of fun black humor sketches that Dolan so deftly shakes out of himself during gigs. He dedicated the song Parasite, for example, to Abaddon, who had split with his partner, though it was more than obvious that the label »parasite« wasn’t aimed at Abaddon. Dolan also ran into an unpleasant incident. Throughout the whole evening there was a genuine fixture in the crowd, a disabled man in a wheelchair, who dutifully followed absolutely every gig. Well, evidently he was also dutifully keeping track of the beer supplies at the bar. By Venom Inc. his mind and body were already so heavily stocked with a surplus of alcohol derivatives that from below the stage he kept yelling and “blessing” Dolan: »Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you…!!!«, which on one occasion so irritated Dolan that he even hurled the mic stand to the ground. The initially annoyed musician then spoke to the crowd quite calmly, saying it’s very sad when some people can still find the time to hate each other. The band professionally played the whole set and came back for an encore rather coldly and routinely. Venom Inc. can deliver more. But the Graz crowd didn’t even deserve that this time. Mantas and Dolan quickly left the stage after the show, only Kling stopped at the front of the stage and shook hands with fans. Too bad about that provocation, but that’s how it goes. All I know is that Venom Inc. are a must-see again next time. At the first real opportunity. Goosebumps are never missing during their shows, they’re that real in everything they do.
The closing part belonged to the classics from the »Black Metal« album: Countless Bathory, Black Metal, Leave Me In Hell, Don’t Burn the Witch The band closed the encore with the cult Sons of Satan and Witching Hour (from the debut »Welcome To Hell«). Here were the lost classics Warhead and Lay Lust. The inclusion of the already mentioned Parasite (»Prime Evil«, 1989) was also a joy, from one of the three albums on which Tony Dolan played bass and sang in Venom instead of Cronos. Suma sumarum. The pact with the devil goes on unblemished. Let’s hope the Venom Inc. crew shows up in Slovenia again next time, where, hopefully, they’ll also get a nicer reception on stage than in Graz. It would be interesting to ask Dolan, over a pint or two, what he honestly thinks of the kind of concertgoers embodied by, e.g., the aforementioned »Wheels of Steel« fanatic.
Setlist
SUFFOCATION:
1. Thrones of Blood
2. Return to the Abyss
3. Effigy of the Forgotten
4. Funeral Inception
5. Abomination Reborn
6. Clarity Through Deprivation
7. Pierced from Within
8. As Grace Descends
9. Entrails of You
9. Liege of Inveracity
10. Catatonia
11. Infecting the Crypts
VENOM INC.:
1. Ave Satanas
2. Welcome to Hell
3. Metal We Bleed
4. Die Hard
5. Live Like an Angel (Die Like a Devil)
6. Parasite
7. Warhead
8. Don’t Burn the Witch
9. War
10. Lady Lust
11. Leave Me in Hell
12. Black n’ Roll
13. Black Metal
14. Countess Bathory
—encore—
15. Sons of Satan
16. Witching Hour
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