Photos: Jerneja Jerak
Location: Ljubljana / Orto bar / Slovenia
Concert date: October 18, 2012
Attendance: 40
Ticket price: €5
The Dirty Skunks are people of action, and as one of the few on Slovenian soil they dare to push above-average homegrown heavy metal rascals who, every so often, actually crank out something good and very easy to swallow. The by now practically folk-classic Kadilnica Of Death is also dedicated to promoting the more extreme shades of black and death metal epics and lyrics. Thanks to Dirty Skunks it teaches the Slovenian masses to read up on metal novelties, and promo prices make for cheaper beer-in-hand boozing and sporting activities like pool, foosball and, once a month, even a concert-fueled neck-vertebrae workout at Orto.
At the October Kadilnica Of Death, the extreme metal gems from Jesenice, Within Destruction, presented their debut From The Depths. We’d already caught them in Ljubljana at the second all-Slovenian brutal beach party, when Suicide Silence delivered their vision of summer revelry on the Gala Hala stage in July and the Jesenice locals took care of the opening warm-up minutes. To be honest, what stuck with me back then was decent enough music, but even more than that they managed to burrow into my brain with bizarre bloody makeup and wretched, ballless stage banter. You could chalk that up to inexperience, the clueless would say, but this Gorenjska quintet of hoarse, noisy nightingales has been on the scene for a good two years (give or take a month), and in that time they can brag about a debut, a deal with the Austrian metal label Noisehead Records and quite a few gigs. So no excuses for mediocrity, which is why I headed to Orto to check out the new level of quality myself.
Thursdays in October have become marked and stamped with the smell of winter, and the cold immediately served up the answer to how many souls would actually show up for one more staging of the bloody baptism on the Savica at Orto. The seriously underfed concert belly of the club’s pit was all the usual faces, and even before the late start the band’s friends, girlfriends and lovers from their home Gorenjska woods had planted themselves up front. The rest of us (or just me) stationed ourselves safely off to the side, waiting for the revelation under the banner of a band that promises total annihilation. It came fast and as expected, when the band took the stage drenched in hectoliters of pig’s blood slaughtered at a home butchering (or maybe just a big load of red tempera): guitarist Ervin Bešič with his guitar slung high, and his short-haired colleague Matjaž Muhič, Tilen Šimon strapped on the bass sporting a new, shorter punkish haircut, Luka Vezzosi sat behind the drums, and Rok Rupnik, in a last-ditch attempt at memorizing the entire setlist, grabbed the mic and silently studied how to pull off a punchy start. It wasn’t punchy at all, because the sound guy fired off the intro sounds too early and the youngsters weren’t ready for them, so they halted the premature ejaculate of noise and preferred to do a bit more warming up and mental prep right there on stage. After a few minutes of bizarre confusion the long-haired vocalist finally pulls himself together and the classic deathcore cinematic intro of Price Of Heresy wafts from the speakers, followed by a solid shockwave of homegrown darkened extreme musicality. Within Destruction are a band who mixed their deathcore enthusiasm with the death metal legacy of Canibal Corpse, and between the blasts from their home-paved podium there’s a good deal of Nordic blackness too, which makes the first dose of the nicely spiced Price Of Heresy genuinely poisonously tasty – if only we hadn’t been served stage statics par excellence. Both guitarists took the left and right sides of the stage in a stage cramp, as if they’d been impaled up the ass with a stake, or were being operated by a puppeteer made sleepy by the late hour and doped up on heavy sedatives. The redheaded bassist got lost among the coordinates of space and time in front of a lanky but insecure drummer, oversaturated with surgical rhythmic precision, while the frontman hunted for stage-posing inspiration between Orto’s too-low ceiling and the membranes of a strategically placed monitor. So as not to get flustered by the piercing stares of the Ljubljana skeptics, he let a thick curtain of hair fall over his eyes and squinted. Within Destruction raised the sound level of the Slovenian metal garage a notch, but the visuals are obviously secondary for these kids. The schizophrenic split between good sound and wretched stage poses was backed by rather lukewarm applause from the crowd, and in the front battle lines only the band’s closest friends and invitees faked their insecure orgasms.
After the opening sprint into the spheres of noise, the visibly razor-sharp Demise plows in, which a visibly nervous Rok introduces briefly and neurotically. The rerun of the stage show stole atoms of attention. The same routine for every stage moment and all that diaphragm-straining also came with calls to mosh to tracks many pairs of ears were hearing for the first time, so these desperate calls to spice up the cannonade with some more active movement went unheard. From The Depths is actually one of the better-polished deathcore products of the local core craft. Besides solid guitar standards and the expected rhythmic meter, it’s the vocals of the talented Rok, blessed with a good pair of vocal cords, that give the songs their above-standard shine. Still, he clearly should’ve taken a short acting course before gigging, or a confidence boost, or at least cast an eye over a couple of DVDs of his idols, who obviously include, besides Chris Barnes and his cannibalistic corpses, also Whitechapel and some demiurges of Gothenburg brilliance going by the name At The Gates. After the ballad-slowed Scandinavian fairytale of While She Was Dying the guys show themselves in the best light with Cardyomypathy, a mesh of intense heavyweight rhythm and accelerated, thin-sounding single-string quasi-solo guitar onanism, hermetically sealed with impressive guttural vocals that you’d never in a million years attribute to Rok. Despite a schoolbook lesson in extreme core, the energy level of this Kadilnica stayed damn low. Even the king of the hellish plains, King Of Serpents, couldn’t join the standouts, and the »Hail Satan« heckle heard at Dead Dildo Drome came off as completely superfluous and like a cry for help. And that cry echoed through the rotten cloacas of my cerebral channels the whole evening, while time dragged as if someone were slowly pulling your brain out through your anus with red-hot tongs. After an hour-long calvary, it was time for the final desecration with Desacration (a broken-off bit of that abbreviation on the stage cheat sheets …) and the crowd, warmed up to the temperature of stale beer, headed off toward new outpourings.
You actually feel for the youngsters from the poisoned Jesenice corner of the country, because they believe in this damn thing themselves, and the unholy gospel in merely-heard form isn’t even as toothless and wretched as the rather static stage burlesque makes it seem by stealing its charm. These days music is listened to with the eyes too, and if Within Destruction skipped that chapter on purpose, some good samaritans should remind them it’s only to their own detriment. When even the local, critical, long-haired lovers of extremity yawn their way statically through the evening, you get scared: what kind of reputation will the young Gorenjska kids carry around Europe, hopefully, on the hellish wind of tours soon? The quality of the music is certainly not in question, but besides aural aesthetics, something more concrete needs to be done about stage presence, because only then will the words grow bone, muscle and the carcinogenic tissue of toxic voluptuousness of a punchy, convincing and above all watchable death metal show. And after that, the word about destruction will be one that anyone can believe, and Within Destruction will fully grow into their name!
Setlist
1. Price of Heresy
2. Demise
3. While She Was Dying
4. Cardiomypathy (Bloodbath)
5. This Misery
6. Bondage
7. Danse Macabre
8. As I Drown
9. King Of Serpents
10. God Of The Soulless
11. Desecration
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