Decapitated Make the Carnival Last Forever at Menza pri koritu! (2011)

Arhiv Arhiv Last updated 3 October 2026

Author: Rok Klemše

Venue: Menza pri koritu, Ljubljana
Date: November 27, 2011
Attendance: 150

After a hefty fall concert season, the end of November brought us one more stop of the Decimation of Europe tour, at Menza pri koritu in Ljubljana. Europe was getting wrecked by Polish technical death metallers Decapiteted and Belgian death/grind machine Aborted, plus a more-or-less listenable trio of openers. The tour crew, visibly loose and in great spirits, took over Menza and put on one of the better shows of the fall!

Canadian (of course, where else) technical death metal outfit Archspire kicked things off with a good old measuring contest, serving up ultra-complex music full of solos, broken riffs and blast beats (sometimes even hyper blasts). What the guys showed in a bit under half an hour was very impressive, but Archspire suffer from what plagues many of today’s technical metal bands: they’re fantastic musicians who know their instruments inside out, but they lack the basics, like how to write a song that actually hangs together. Still, it was nice to rest the ears during the phenomenal dual guitar soloing (one of the guitarists, naturally, with his back buckling under the weight of an eight-string), joined by an equally skilled bassist, and when all three of them pulled off some seriously sick tapping, there was nothing left to do but nod along in approval. The brutal growls of the vocalist (in a cool N.W.A. shirt; fo shizzle) helped the picture too, and he also held the show together with some funny banter between songs.

The good start fizzled a bit when Cyanide Serenity slipped up on the playground and scraped their knees (which mommy then kissed better). Over a good half hour, the British band wore out a small and uninterested crowd with a perfectly confident performance but all the more average music. The brew of death and groove metal with core elements just didn’t go down easy. Not even the solid growling of Travis Neal (Divine Heresy) helped, and the Brits slipped up even worse with weak breakdowns and groove metal bits that were shamelessly lifted from Sepultura (I’m mainly aiming at the Roots era).

The ears got a bit more rest again with the set by Italian band Fleshgod Apocalypse, who are doing a pretty good job of rescuing the bad reputation that (deservedly) clings to Italian metal. As always, the Italians marched onstage in torn tuxedos and blackened faces, and it looked like the classic Italian composers Verdi, Vivaldi, Paganini and Puccini had just risen from the grave. Fleshgod Apocalypse work classical music elements into their death metal, and their technically impressive solos have a strong neoclassical spirit. Once the Italians hopped on the scooter (ciao), they didn’t stop until the end of the show, and it was one blast after another. Nonstop fast, aggressive songs followed one another, to the point that by the end of their set it all got almost monotonous. Still, Fleshgod Apocalypse managed to round out the lineup with a keyboardist who found his footing live brilliantly, since his soloing doesn’t sound like cat torture (à la the keyboards of Finnish power metal bands) but just adds to the demonic atmosphere. The zombie composers tore through songs off the current record Agony like a tornado, led above all by the wrecking-ball hit The Violation, where the bassist’s high falsetto vocals gave you a feeling of what it would be like to be skinned alive. The Italians closed out the stormy set on a thrilling note with the classic Thru Our Scars.

The Belgian band (well, Belgian only thanks to frontman and sole remaining original member Sven de Caluwe) didn’t caress the ears with symphonic bits but sodomized them with a sick, depraved, punky mix of death metal and grind. Aborted were marking the tenth anniversary of the album Engineerin the Dead on this tour, so there was no shortage of slaughter with songs from it, and the guys didn’t forget the classic album Goremageddon, the debut The Purity of Perversion or The Archaic Abattoir either. As a big Carcass fan, the only thing I missed was a little medley from Slaughter & Apparatus, which is heavily inspired by those death/grind giants. Sven and his murderous gang chopped Menza into a pile of blood, with the killer songs coming one after another, Sven grunting like a boar and squealing like Babe, and the band hacking and sawing mercilessly like Leatherface, Mike Myers and Jason rolled into one. The band’s punch carried over to the crowd too, who moshed eagerly among the pillars of Menza pri koritu, and with what they showed, Aborted made it clear we can expect a lot from the upcoming album Global Flatline.

Probably the most eagerly awaited band of the night was the Polish technical death metal machine Decapitated. After the tragic death of drummer Vitek, and with vocalist Covan still not healed from that accident, the band returns completely reborn and refreshed. The only original member, guitarist Vogg, proved he has an iron will, a burning desire and a lion’s heart to carry on the band’s path after his brother’s death (Waclaw “Vogg” Kieltyka and Witold “Vitek” Kieltyka were brothers and the band’s founders). He gathered a new lineup around him, which recorded at the start of this year and released over the summer the excellent new record Carnival Is Forever, a kind of rebirth for Decapitated. And what a rebirth it is! Like a hurricane, Decapitated wrapped the already pretty tired crowd in stormy winds of broken riffs, technically complex passages, otherworldly solos and earth-shaking drumming. New drummer Krimh got the toughest job of all: stepping into the shoes of the fantastic Vitek, who in his lifetime, at a tender early twenties, was already considered one of the best drummers of the young generation. Krimh clearly doesn’t lag far behind, pounding out even the most demanding transitions with great dignity, confidence and professionalism, and the dude apparently has metronomes instead of legs, because I haven’t heard such precise double-pedal work in quite a while. New vocalist Rafal slotted nicely into the lineup; after the Aborted chaos he managed, with quite a bit of effort, to revive the already rather tired crowd, though he could show a little more originality instead of just nonstop “oi, oi.” The guys more than successfully presented songs from the “come-back” album Carnival is Forever and, besides it, focused on the records Nihility and Organic Halucinosis. Decapitated wrapped up the bombastic set in grand style with the wrecking classic Spheres of Madness, and after the guys took our breath away, we finally managed to breathe again. They could have played just a song or two more; a round ten just got us nicely wet and worked up when it was all over too soon. Decapitated are back in a big way, and it’s great to hear that even tragedy didn’t stop Vogg, because Decapitated keep grinding on mercilessly! If what’s written on the backdrop applies to anyone, it applies to Decapitated – From Pain to Strength!

Photos: Nina Grad