Author: Rok Klemše
Photos: Nina Grad
Video: Primož Novak
Venue: Trainstation Squat, Kranj, Slovenia
Concert date: 10.04.2014
Attendance: 200
The band under the knife this time probably gave us by far the most controversial and »talked about« moment in the concert history of our stages. People still talk about the 2007 show by Swedish black metal heavyweights Watain at Orto bar, and even more about their painting masterpieces and aromas (if you don’t know what that’s about, the documentary Dekada smrada is a must-watch). As persona non grata, Watain didn’t play Orto this time, but they brought their black metal to Kranj’s Trainstation Squat, which had never hosted an international name this big. The turnout matched, with a good two hundred heads already in the room for the opening act, despite the early hour.
The start of the show was tailor-made for the working-class plebs, with the support band hitting the stage at a quarter to eight. Early or not, Sweden’s Degial stormed the stage like a hurricane and blasted out a good half hour of hellish death metal from the Uppsala death metal circle (Sarcasm, Graveless, Invidious). The hometown buddies of the night’s bloody headliners released their debut Death’s Striking Wings the year before last, blackening the roots of Swedish death metal, which grew out of bands like Nihilist, and wrapping them in the blasphemous atmosphere of black metal. For a good half hour Degial pounded us with the most wicked, dark and ominous sounds in death metal that we haven’t heard since early Morbid Angel. The foursome stunned above all with murderous guitar riffing. The guitar duo dumped out riffs somewhere in the neighborhood of that cult promo blurb for Dark Angel’s Time Does Not Heal, and countless Degial riffs proved to be devout worshippers at the little Altars of Madness shrine. This technically sharp band also won us over with crushing drumming, a constant racket and an atmosphere fitting for blasphemous old school death metal, backed up by green and blue lights (at moments it felt like Degial had teleported us to Cthulhu’s underwater resting place) and a frontman who didn’t utter a single word. Even though Degial got a bit monotone and repetitive toward the end, you couldn’t have wished for a better, more fitting warm-up for Watain.
If Degial led us into a chaos of death and darkness, Watain took the occult and blasphemous level up another notch with their performance. The hulking stage, dressed up like something out of Clive Barker’s worst nightmares, with the obligatory props like skulls, candles and chalices, already hinted at that. The spiritual heirs of the legendary Dissection released their fifth studio album, The Wild Hunt, last year, and it got a mixed reception, but whatever you think of it, Watain live are always the definition of great black metal. From the darkest depths Watain dragged out only the most sinister and demonic sounds, as the intro Night Vision and the first track De Profundis already proved. Led by charismatic frontman Erik Danielsson, the Swedes performed their own ritual on stage, which culminated in a shower of blood during the aptly titled Devil’s Blood. Despite all the circus, though, there’s something more hiding under all those black metal clichés in Watain. They fantastically swap brutal black metal parts full of aggression and unbridled rawness with melodic, epic lines that, together with the band’s stage look, make for a downright transcendental experience. Watain walked the line between primitive and ethereal the whole time, and that border was marked by the excellent guitar solos, which sadly were often botched and way too quiet, buried under the buzzing-hive drone of the riffs and the thunder of the rhythm section under countless blast beats. Watain were like a helmsman on the river Lethe, steering us through timeless waters and leaving us stripped of our physical bodies somewhere far away in the chaos of eternal darkness.
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