Author: Rok Klemše
Photos: Nina Grad
Venue: Orto bar, Ljubljana
Concert date: 22.06.2017
Summer festivals are right around the corner (some have already come and gone), and that means the clubs are shutting their doors. But before Orto locks up for two months, it hosted one last club show of the season, tailor-made for fans of technical death metal. After last October, Canadian technical death metal masters Beyond Creation came back to Ljubljana, one of the genre’s most prominent acts, from a country up north that’s absolutely teeming with them. Anyone who follows technical death metal knows Canada is a real Mecca for the genre, with bands like Neuraxis, Archspire, the sadly long-inactive Marty and Quo Vadis, Augury, Gorguts, Cryptopsy, and we could go on.
On this tour Beyond Creation set their sights on Europe and brought along Swiss newcomers Virvum, who put themselves on the technical death metal map with last year’s debut Illuminance. For a debut it’s actually seriously impressive, and Virvum showed up in a great light at Orto too, taking the stage a few minutes late and then quickly firing up the wheels of the death train. The guys won everyone over right away with great sound and devilishly tight playing, and it all looked even better thanks to unexpected twists and (re)turns. Virvum raged, complicated and brutalized like Necrophagist and Spawn of Possession one moment, veered into the spacey atmosphere of Cynic, Vektor or at times even Devin Townsend the next, and then smashed everything up with technical deathcore breakdowns a la Rings of Saturn or Veil of Maya. Toward the end of their set Virvum did start to drag a little, mostly down to the often monotonous vocals, but all in all they were an excellent warm-up for the main band of the night.
If Virvum’s youth made for an extremely convincing performance, it faded completely once Canadian technical death metal force Beyond Creation landed on stage. The Canadians already left a mark with their first show here, and this time they only cemented their Slovenian fanbase. Beyond Creation made a name for themselves in 2011 with the excellent debut The Aura, and proved they’re no one-hit wonder three years later with the even better follow-up Earthborn Evolution. From the very first notes the band spun the crowd into a merciless tornado of progressive/technical death metal, tearing up everything around it with shrapnel. Blast beats and unconventional approaches from drummer Phillipe Boucher (who also plays in another excellent Canadian technical death metal band, Chthe’ilist) flattened everything in their path, Hugo Doyon-Karout’s bass guitar rattled beautifully the whole time, and the most impressive of all was the surgical precision of the guitar duo Simon Girard/Kevin Chartre, who kept effortlessly pulling out shredded arpeggios and tapped solos like it was nothing. Beyond Creation are the very definition of top-tier tightness and virtuosity, and they confirm the fact that the vast majority of Canada’s population evidently spends the long winters, and the time hiding from Sasquatch, playing guitars. Beyond Creation delivered on the vocal front too, as Simon’s vocals are varied and dynamic, and they wowed the crowd with moments of pure jazz fusion as well. The excellent show by the outstanding Beyond Creation will be remembered fondly and makes a great send-off into the summer festival season.
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