Author: Rok Klemše
Photos: Nina Grad
Video: Primož Novak
Venue: Kino Šiška, Ljubljana
Concert date: 24.06.2014
First off: what we saw in Šiška less than a week ago wasn’t Death. A cult band, one of the most important and influential metal acts of all time, simply can’t exist without Chuck Schuldiner. Without his influence, death metal would probably sound different today, even though he modestly shrugged off that status. Still, there’s no doubt that even if he wasn’t the »founder« of the death metal movement, he’s certainly one of the first to breathe life into it (hehe) and one of the greatest and most respected figures of the genre. And second: Death (DTA) is first and foremost a project celebrating Chuck’s immortal legacy. Original members are involved, along with the band’s longtime manager Eric Greif (an interview with him is coming soon), the project is backed by the Schuldiner family, and part of the proceeds goes to Sweet Relief, an organization that helps ailing musicians in the US who can’t afford treatment because of the American healthcare system (and which also helped Chuck). But above all, it’s the music that speaks, and in Death’s case it speaks for itself in all its glory. And the blood-red Death logo hanging in the hall gave the feeling of something special, something through which the spirit of Chuck Schuldiner lives on.
First on stage was the cult Canadian technical death metal outfit Gorguts, who were at least as big a reason to come to the show as the headliners. And Gorguts more than lived up to the high expectations! The Canadian veterans, led by the unstoppable Luc Lemay, put out one record after another in the nineties that are now considered cornerstones of technical, even avant-garde death metal, and in 2005, after drummer Steve MacDonald’s suicide, they called it quits. But their rest didn’t last very long: Lemay soon got the wheels of the band turning again, and last year the unstoppable Gorguts machine released an excellent, incredibly powerful comeback album (in terms of conviction definitely somewhere on the level of Carcass’s comeback with Surgical Steel), Colored Sands. The Canadians already played Metalcamp two years ago, before the new album came out, but despite a convincing set they somehow went unnoticed. After this one, that surely won’t happen. Gorguts greeted the already nicely packed hall in the first half of a good hour-long set (finally a fitting amount of time for a band of this caliber, even in a support slot!) with the seismic shifts of Colored Sands. The very first notes made it clear that nothing awaited us but the sound of bones being ground by experimental death metal at its finest; Lemay’s psychotic riffs, which in their boldest moments reach almost psychedelic stretches of otherworldly dissonance, atonal solos drawing inspiration from classical composers like Šostakovič, Penderecki and Bartok, brutal vocals, and inhumanly demanding drumming, which the phenomenal Patrice Hamelin (Quo Vadis, ex-Martyr, Cephalic Carnage and Beneath the Massacre) pulled off with feather-light ease, buried the hall like sand. Like the sand that is the central theme of Colored Sands, like Tibetan mandalas, those beautiful geometric creations that Buddhist monks make out of sand. And ritually destroy once they’re finished. If Buddhist doctrine sees that as a symbol of the passage from material to spiritual life, it can also be a parallel for Gorguts, whose meticulously crafted elements transcend the merely material essence of music. Gorguts closed their set with a trio of crushing classics, Nostalgia, Inverted and Obscura, and even if it’s true that their vision of music for the ears, nerve endings and brain isn’t exactly the easiest thing to digest, what they showed in Šiška was total technical death metal perfection.
I can’t remember the last time an extreme metal show on our turf drew a crowd this good, which only proves what a mighty, immortal legacy Chuck Schuldiner left behind after his untimely death in 2001. We younger generations never had the chance to see Death live in their one true form, so DTA is the only way to relive the greatness of a musical genius live. This incarnation of the project includes three quarters of the lineup that recorded the groundbreaking album Human (1991) with Chuck, the one with which Death truly set out on their path of progressive death metal – Steve DiGiorgio (bass; Testament, Sadus), Paul Masvidal (guitar; Cynic) and Sean Reinert (drums; Cynic), while Max Phelps (Cynic, Exist) respectfully stepped into Chuck’s enormous shoes. They greeted us in fitting style with the opening Human crusher Flattening of Emotions, which put Death in a new light 23 years ago, the one that marked the band’s path all the way to the end – more complex structures, advanced approaches, varied rhythms, brilliant melodies and more thoughtful, socially critical and introspective lyrics. Flattening of Emotions wrapped the loud, energetic and devoted crowd in the cloud of thoughts of a paranoid schizophrenic, and it also showed the band’s first strengths and weaknesses. Phelps was fantastic, easily the one with the toughest job, and he pulled it off with excellent playing and even better singing (with a few truly top-notch screams), and on top of that his silhouette with the BC Rich Stealth guitar looked eerily like Chuck’s at times. With the help of the energetic DiGiorgio (wearing slippers, hehe), whose bass lines and fretless bass string-sliding once again raised goosebumps, he and Phelps managed to cover up the countless flubs of the Cynic duo fairly successfully. Masvidal, or rather his guitar, was plagued by obvious technical problems (watching him jump around the stage was also rough), and one of the bigger drumming names in metal was a complete letdown. A visibly worn-out Reinert acted like a grandma behind the kit, playing most of the parts with no energy at all and noticeably slower than the originals.
In the first part of the show, despite the flubs that musicians of Reinert and Masvidal’s caliber really shouldn’t allow themselves, the goosebumps came from the »anthem« to lepers, Leprosy, with its massive riffs and Phelps’s brutal vocals, the speed-fueled Left to Die with its cupa-cupa drums and splendidly screamed lyrics about a dying soldier, one of the best-known Death tracks, Suicide Machine, with its brilliant lyrics about euthanasia (»How easy it is to deny the pain of someone else’s suffering«), a genius interplay of sinister guitars and DiGiorgio’s ripping bass lines, and a pair with Spiritual Healing, the title track a critique of American evangelical preachers who implant their own opinions in sheep with none of their own and brainwash them in the name of God (the explosive chorus sounded fantastic!), and Within the Mind, during which the crowd boiled over already in the opening immortal riffing and then again during the orgasmic solo. The first part of the show was rounded off by the instrumental Cosmic Sea, after which the curtain dropped and a moving video tribute to the fallen bandleader played, with screams and chants of Schuldiner’s name echoing through the hall. The best part of the show was probably its middle, when Hannes Grossman (Obscura) sat behind the drums in place of Reinert (who had presumably gone off to grab a quadruple Whopper), and there was no trace of the earlier sleepy drumming. Grossman’s playing was tight, energetic and a real bomb, especially as the guys tore through the phenomenal trio of Crystal Mountain, Spirit Crusher and Symbolic, which was screamed excellently, in place of Phelps, by another Obscura man, Steffen Kummerer (even though he totally botched the start of Symbolic). With the »gore fest« of the bloody pair Zombie Ritual and Baptized in Blood, the guys took us back to the days of Evil Chuck, and then, considering the rich treasure trove of songs, wrapped up the show too quickly with Lack of Comprehension and Pull the Plug.
I’ll never forget the time, many years ago, when a friend sent me a package in the mail with God Fucking Stuff Inside written on it in big letters. The contents were the album Symbolic dubbed onto a cassette, which blew me away the first time and still does every single time since. And everything Death recorded really is god fucking stuff and even though Chuck’s legacy speaks for itself and doesn’t need countless »tributes«, they’re only proof of his greatness and of the fact that the memory of Schuldiner and everything he did for extreme metal will never die. »What has now been days, it seems like years/To stay like this in what I fear/Life ends so fast, so take your chance/And make it last« (Chuck Schuldiner, Leprosy).
Setlist
GORGUTS:
1. Le Toit du Monde
2. An Ocean of Wisdom
3. Forgotten Arrows
4. Colored Sands
5. Reduced to Silence
6. Orphans of Sickness
7. Nostalgia
8. Inverted
9. Obscura
DEATH:
1. Flattening of Emotions
2. Leprosy/Left to Die
3. Suicide Machine
4. Spiritual Healing/Within the Mind
5. Cosmic Sea
6. Crystal Mountain
7. Spirit Crusher
8. Symbolic
9. Zombie Ritual
10. Baptized In Blood
11. Lack of Comprehension
— encore —
12. Pull the Plug
Photo Gallery
