Death Metal Mincing with Monstrosity!

Tampa, Florida is synonymous with death metal, since that’s where the genre was spawned by Death, Morbid Angel, Obituary and Cannibal Corpse (the latter moved to Florida from Buffalo a bit later). Sadly, in the shadow of the bigger and commercially more successful death metal bands, plenty of quality acts were left behind, like Nocturnus, Brutality and Monstrosity. Plenty of people had written off the last of those completely, since their last album, Spiritual Apocalypse, came out way back in 2007, after which they more or less sank into oblivion. But the death metal heart of the only remaining original member, drummer Lee Harrison, still beats strong, and last fall Monstrosity rose from the dead with a killer comeback record, The Passage of Existence. To the great delight of death metal purists, it brought them to Ljubljana too!

First on stage, with the customary fifteen-minute “academic” delay, were Cold Snap from Varaždin, who are no strangers to Slovenian stages. Last year they played the Lemmy stage at Metaldays, for example. This time the five-piece appeared on a much smaller stage, but in front of a similarly sparse crowd. The reasons are probably the early hour and the nice weather, which kept plenty of people out in the Orto courtyard, but it’s also a fact that Cold Snap play a distinctly outdated form of metal that has an even harder time finding its place among fans of bands like Monstrosity. Musically, Cold Snap are stuck somewhere in the late nineties and early two-thousands, when bands like Sepultura with Roots and then Soulfly brought down-tuned riffs and groove into metal. Cold Snap did their set confidently and energetically, but absolutely nobody complained that it ended up considerably shorter than originally planned.

An even bigger genre departure from the night’s headliner came from Britain’s The Devil, who are also old acquaintances of our stages (they’ve played Metaldays too). The instrumental four-piece, who play atmospheric metal, were once again hidden behind masks reminiscent of the Venetian carnival, and they successfully wrapped Orto in the visually most beautiful part of the evening. The nice play of stage lights wasn’t enhanced just by the band’s look, but above all by the footage projected in the background showing human errors and delusions (wars, atomic destruction, political propaganda), underlined by audio clips of all sorts of quotes and speeches. But what felt interesting for a song or two quickly turned boring and monotonous, and it doesn’t exactly speak in The Devil’s favor that their one and only studio album came out way back in 2012. The set was nicely spiced up in the end by the appearance of a hooded monk with lasers on his fingers, who looked like the leader of some apocalyptic cult, but that’s also pretty much the most that stuck in the memory from the band’s show.

After two groups that were totally wrong for the bill genre-wise, the time had finally come for the long-awaited return of the legendary Florida death metallers Monstrosity to the land of the living. Sadly, for most of their career they remained “that former band of George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher”, and unfairly never managed to shake that status. Maybe that fired them up even more, because they honestly don’t have a bad studio album in their entire career, and they proved they still know what real death metal is with The Passage of Existence, one of the best death metal albums of 2018. Monstrosity greeted the Ljubljana crowd with a trio of songs from that very record, and with Cosmic Pandemia-Kingdom of Fire-Radiated, the guys immediately proved they sound damn good. The guitarist on the right, whose name I sadly couldn’t dig up, with his button-up shirt, glasses and curls, would have looked more at home in The Black Dahlia Murder than in Monstrosity, but he did his job really well, and with his help, and above all thanks to the excellent Harrison, Monstrosity ground the crowd to dust with a choice selection of death metal wrecking balls. The Americans pleased the hundred-headed crowd or so with a return to Spiritual Apocalypse, and even more with a trip back in time to the cult albums Imperial Doom, In Dark Purity and Millenium. Monstrosity did a superb job and, with great sound, satisfied the huge appetite for a hard-hitting dose of death metal. The only slightly bitter aftertaste came from the lack of communication with the audience, which was practically nonexistent, since Mike Hrubovcak managed to say nothing more than announce a single song, plus a (too) short set, contrary to what had been announced. Monstrosity said goodbye after just one hour, and Harrison even crammed a pretty out-of-place and pointless drum solo into that hour. The Monstrosity show will stay a fond memory, but sadly it didn’t quite offer anything above and beyond.