Author: Rok Klemše
Location: Gala hala, Ljubljana
Concert date: 05.02.2012
Attendance: 100
The year has turned and a new club concert season is underway. Its metal chapter kicked off at Gala hala with a stop on the Occupy Europe 2012 Campaign tour, headed up by American technical death metallers Origin, with Tasmanian devils Psycroptic keeping them company. Despite it being a Monday night, with some more snow thrown in for good measure, about a hundred fans of brutal vocals, broken rhythms and technical guitar wizardry gathered in the fantastically renovated Gala hala.
First on stage were France’s Ite Missa Est, who spent a good half hour serving up their played-out take on an even more played-out genre that’s already been milked to death: deathcore. The French played the tracks from their debut Ante Bellum, which came out last year, a good few years after deathcore’s biggest boom, in a perfectly decent and technically polished fashion. Ite Missa Est (their name means “go, it is sent”, which are supposedly the words handed to the little lambs during mass) stacked breakdown on breakdown, but they didn’t build a palace, just a barely standing shack made of shit and hay. Even worse, the breakdowns weren’t just painfully generic and cliché, there were more of them than expensive rags on deathcore fans, and the intro to one of the songs was an obvious Meshuggah “rip-off”, obvious even to the deaf. The frontman strained himself and pulled faces like bulldog Vinnie Jones in… well, practically every movie, and in broken English he tried so hard, begging the crowd to step closer, but we were just glad when Ite Missa Est finally lived up to their name and cleared off the stage.
After a painful half hour came Belgian grinders Leng Tch`e, and with them the evening finally took a turn for the better (musically). Even though there isn’t a single original member left in the band, the foursome played their set professionally, but above all in the spirit of true grindcore: brutal, and thanks to a deranged frontman who looks like Mr. T (apparently there’s more money in grind these days than in selling top shop cookers). Well, Serge Kasongo is his real name, and with his psychotic performance he managed to wake up a crowd that had been fairly uninterested until then. Brutal vocal outbursts, spitting, sick humor, cool grind riffs and the merciless pounding of the open, baby-faced drummer set off the first mini mosh pits too, and thanks to the band’s great show the crowd shook off its Monday zombie mode. Even though the band’s vision of grindcore got a little monotonous and repetitive after half an hour, all I can say is “I pity the fool” who didn’t headbang to Leng Tch`e!
Only when the “co-headliners”, Tasmanian devils Psycroptic, hit the stage did things really get going. The Australian technical death metal outfit, which rocketed onto the international scene with the cult album The Scepter of the Ancients, will release its new record The Inherited Repression tomorrow, so most of the set was devoted to promoting it. With their last two records, Psycroptic brought their music a bit closer to a wider audience, bringing more restraint, even more melody and more groove into the arrangements. And may the devil take me if this wasn’t the Tasmanians’ best show here, even though vocalist Jason Peppiatti was missing. Zdenek Šimeček (Godless Truth) replaced him more than successfully, doing his job as session vocalist like an old hand of the band. He growled the vocal lines superbly, while the band’s real magic lies in the astonishing technical prowess of the Haley brothers, David behind the drums and Joe on guitar. David, with phenomenal drumming full of colorful, well-thought-out transitions, provided the perfect foundation for Joe’s innovative riffing, dissonant passages and wild solos. Even though the Tasmanian devils have toned down their brutal sound a bit, they still bite with sharp hammers and tear with spiked talons!
After a short soundcheck the lights finally went out one last time, and the chilling voice of Brother Cavil from the cult series Battlestar Galactica boomed out of the speakers: “I don`t want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to – I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can`t even express these things properly because I have to – I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the wind of a supernova flowing over me! I`m a machine! And I can know much more! I can experience so much more. But I`m trapped in this absurd body! And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way!” And what Origin played over the next hour was nothing less than a supernova explosion straight to the face. With their extreme, technical death metal, pushed to the very limits of what humans can do with instruments, the Kansas foursome peeled the crowd like gamma rays, layer by layer, until only a little pile of dust was left behind us. Origin occupied Europe this time with the new album Entity, giving it a generous chunk of playing time, but they didn’t forget its predecessor Antithesis and the band’s older stuff either. And Origin’s brutal divinity sucked us in like hell in Event Horizon. The band builds its music on an ultra-technical approach, and that goes for every single member: drummer John Longstreth pounds the kit like an animal on adrenaline, plays brutal passages with feather-light ease, and tops off his lively, dynamic approach to extreme drumming, in the truest sense of the word, with cannon-like double bass precision. Guitarist Paul Ryan tosses off razor-sharp riffs as a joke, and he doesn’t need any lavish posing while soloing, since his breathtaking riffs are already built on fast arpeggio sweeps, plus he provides extra vocal support with monstrous screaming. The finger-walking of bassist Mike Flores is hard to even follow, since it doesn’t stop for a second, and he pounds the bass like Ellen Ripley going after the Queen Bitch. Besides the incredible instrumental trio, new vocalist Jason Keyser really stood out this time. Not just with his brutal and flawless growling but with a true frontman approach. The crowd was eating out of the hand of the charismatic, fully committed and rowdy Jason from the first second on, Jason even stage-dived twice himself, and he managed to get the energetic crowd to do a circle pit, even one performed in silence. A full 16 brutal, technically polished crushers flew by in a flash, as if for that hour a black hole, an entity called Origin, had swallowed up Gala hala!
This year’s first death metal blast made sure we left Gala hala with aching necks and ringing ears, but the coming month promises a few more death metal treats: next week New Zealand’s Ulcerate will shake Orto, at the end of the month come Krisiun and Malevolent Creation, and in March Obscura and Spawn of Possession!
Photos: Nina Grad
Setlist
ORIGIN: 1. Expulsion of Fury 2. Purgatory 3. Conceiving Death 4. Wrath of Vishnu 5. Vomit You Out 6. Staring From the Abyss 7. Aftermath 8. The Burner 9. Implosion of Eternity 10. Swarm 11. Saligia 12. Finite 13. Antithesis 14. Portal 15. Evolution of Extinction 16. Banishing Illusion
Photo Gallery
