Location: Ljubljana / Channel Zero / Slovenia
Concert date: 12.11.2013
Attendance: 25 – 35
Ticket price: 20 € / 24 €
Tuesday night was about to end on a sorry note instead of the promised brutalization, because Austrian police held up a van with the »backline« gear needed for the whole tour package at the border crossing: Morthem, Beheaded, Internal Bleeding and Disgorge. After a good hour of waiting, the uncertainty in the room was finally dispelled when the van rolled in, and the show got going a bit late after all.
Let’s take it from the top – ironically, Austria’s Morthem were first on stage, and while we’d been joking before they started that they’d surely catch a few snide remarks about how their police operate, the opening track knocked that thought right out of our heads. The five-piece that makes up Morthem sees itself as five fingers that, together as a fist, pulverize everything and everyone in front of them. And their set was exactly like that – punchy, fast, loud. As openers they set the bar high for the night, and it was clear the next bands would have a tough job matching it or even topping it.
The first ones who sadly failed to reach that bar were Beheaded. After watching the drummer take his sweet time setting up, the letdown hit hard, because everything sounded monotonous and without any standout moments. It was obvious that something was bugging him too, as he kept peeking behind the backstage curtain and conferring between songs or complaining, who knows. Music that should be a wellspring of energy turned into a black hole that sucked the energy right out of the room and left me indifferent and drained.
The bar was definitely cleared by Internal bleeding, old tomcats who, with a few breaks, have been at it since 1991 and who, along with Suffocation, are named by many as the originators of so-called »slam death metal«. You can hear that New York groove in the music, which bands all over the world try to copy without much luck. “You’re either a New Yorker or you’re not!” Frontman Keith DeVito mentioned several times that their music is “New York style” and expected wild craziness below the stage. They clearly had big expectations of a wild Slovenian crowd, but sadly there wasn’t a sight or sound of one. We got only a small circle pit, which put a smile on the band members’ faces. The big applause at the end let them know that, despite the calm crowd, they’d done what they came to do and satisfied the audience.
Since this was a night of ups and downs, the wave dropped back down into the depths with Disgorge. Energetic frontman Angel Ochoa and the rest of the bouncy, slamming band members didn’t win over me or a few others, because just like with Beheaded, everything sounded growlingly monotonous. Were it only my ears that were tired and therefore unable to handle the grind brutalization they served up?! I don’t know. I do hope the rest of the crowd was happier than I was.
The night itself was definitely a good dose of brutality, though everyone would have wished for a bigger turnout and more support for this genre. Sadly, current music trends point to the rise of fast-rising instant bands copying the originators of drum massacring, while the ones who first brought grind and death to the scene get forgotten. I optimistically hope that one day the kids will give the pioneers of death metal a chance too, and the average age of the crowd will be 20 and not 30+. And then even more of us will get to enjoy small clubs that deliver first-rate vibes when listening to this kind of music.
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