Location: Vienna – Austria
Concert date: 17.02.2012
Attendance: 0
The Full Of Hate festival metal caravan has been rolling through Europe these past few days. The name bugs the writer of this review quite a bit, since it conjures up all kinds of negative stuff, but luckily the bands hiding behind the tour’s title matter more, and those are Cannibal Corpse, Behemoth and Misery Index. The original caravan is even richer, with Legion Of The Damned, Suicidal Angels and Nexus Inferis on the bill, but those three didn’t make it to Vienna, because traffic threw a wrench in their plans – their bus broke down somewhere along the way, so the stage of the Viennese club Arena was left to the first three names mentioned.
The Vienna Arena is a stone’s throw from the ring road, and if you ever end up there, look for the cousin of our Metelkova after the exit – the lot and the surroundings are almost identical, except the territory isn’t split up into a pile of smaller clubs but into three at most, one quasi-pub and a summer stage, which in my opinion can hold at least 700 people in front of it. The festival itself naturally went down in the biggest club room of the Arena, and the stage was opened by America’s Misery Index, who in 40 minutes, with thunderously good sound, mostly played hits off their last two records, Traitors and Heirs To Thievery. Which means we didn’t get a proper dose of their classic grind, but more of the death metal material. The double vocal assault, inhumanly fast drums and tank-grade riffs turned the hall into a complete madhouse. For all the intelligence of their socially critical and very well-read lyrics, it’s sad that guitarist/vocalist Mark Kloeppel wasted time on cliché speeches along the lines of ”Are we having fun or what?!!” and the even dumber ”Give me a Fuck Yeah!!!” Fewer words and we’d have gotten another killer track or two. Still, it’s great to see a band used to smaller crowds do their job more than brilliantly and leave behind a high bar for everything that followed on stage. Poland’s Behemoth had no trouble clearing that bar.
Poland’s Behemoth were the ”co-headliners” of the night, since their reputation and weight in the scene are nearly equal to, if not greater than, what America’s Cannibal Corpse have built up over 20-odd years, and Cannibal Corpse were the ones closing the night as the main act. But with Behemoth it’s been a long time since it was about proving they’re worth something – they proved themselves over the last ten years, when they landed at the very top of the extreme metal pantheon. This time it was about something completely different. The tour is actually called the Phoenix Rising Tour, and the whole thing is a reference to the return to the stage of, above all, singer/guitarist/big boss Adam ”Nergal” Darski, who just a year and a half ago almost left this world because of leukemia.
If you take that into account, it’s clear why every show on this tour means so much to the Polish apocalyptic quartet. Before it, they’d played only a couple of gigs in Poland, where it was more than obvious that Nergal, Orion, Inferno and Seth were hungry for stages. Still, Behemoth are only human, and when the first among equals is nowhere near his former strength after a nearly deadly illness, it shows more than enough. But did Behemoth maybe play a bad show? You can’t even think that. Despite the weaker power of Nergal’s vocals and the visible thinness and fatigue of the iron man in question, Behemoth kept us happy for more than an hour with material mostly from their latest album Evangelion, spiced up with some pretty unorthodox picks from the rich Behemoth repertoire. They focused mainly on the earlier black metal era, so songs from And The Forests Dream Eternaly and even Pandemonic Incantations didn’t go missing either. The band dominated the situation on a superbly decorated stage – the jam-packed hall was eating out of the hands of the loud little devils, and every note carried an unstoppable will to overcome all obstacles, which Nergal especially highlighted during Conquer All and Alas, The Lord Is Upon Me. Add an unbelievably epic ending in the form of the diabolically poetic epic Lucifer and you’ve got proof that the fiery demon has risen and has no intention of stopping – he’ll just have to gather a bit of strength first.
The night was closed by the American elder statesmen of the world’s brutal death metal scene, Cannibal Corpse, who are right on the verge of releasing the album Torture, which hits the market on Women’s Day. Starting with the morbidly slow but nuclear-explosive hit Evisceration Plague, Cannibal Corpse showed off their unpredictable nature, and with a setlist pattern of slow song – fast song, then slow again – fast again, they sketched out the sonic landscape of a show that ran well over an hour. In that hour we heard only two new songs – Demented Aggression and Scourge Of Iron – while the quintet, backed by an almost too powerful sound, delivered a cross-section of their 20-plus-year career. Alex Webster’s bass acrobatics stood right alongside the incredible neck muscles of the brutal bruiser George ”Corpsegrinder” Fisher, but it would all be worth just a drop of the blood mentioned in all those songs if it weren’t for the excellent guitarists Pat O’Brien, who toured Europe last year even with Slayer, and his pick-wielding brother Rob Barrett. Alongside the staples like I Cum Blood or Fucked With The Knife and the obligatory Stripped Raped Strangled and Hammer Smashed Face, the Cannibals surprised us with Covered With Sores, Born in A Casket and plenty of songs from the album Kill, and they even played The Wretched Spawn, which really doesn’t happen often. But the crowd, which for reasons unknown to the writer of this review loves flinging full glasses of beer flying all over the hall, was visibly worn out by then. What can you do – Behemoth are tough competition, and even Cannibal Corpse sometimes have to kneel before their younger brothers.
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