Technical Death Metal Deluge with Obscura (2020)

As far as Mondays go, Garfield is absolutely right: they suck. But a concert evening like the one that went down last week at Ort makes starting a new week a whole lot easier. German technical death metal heavyweights Obscura returned to Ljubljana behind their record Diluvium, joined by a truly excellent supporting package: Dutch blackened death metal war machine God Dethroned, melodic black metallers Thulcandra, and French tech wizards Fractal Universe.

Opening duties this time fell to Fractal Universe, the act most closely aligned with the headliners in terms of genre. The French progressive/technical death metallers have introduced themselves to Slovenian audiences before, namely at Metaldays 2017. Back then they were among the first to play the New Forces stage and came away as one of the festival’s more pleasant surprises. The French played their first club show here on this trip and, despite the early hour, pulled in a decent crowd. Fractal Universe aren’t exactly reinventing the wheel — most of the ingredients that make up their technically complex and kinetic tracks are genuine déjà vu, things you’ve heard elsewhere. The Nancy four-piece wears its influences more or less openly: fellow countrymen Gojira and Gorod, and also Obscure and The Faceless. Even so, Fractal Universe’s broken rhythms and staccato riffs — custom-built for headbanging — were interesting enough that you can’t hold the resemblance to their heroes too much against them. The one weak link, unfortunately, was the tired clean vocals of Vince Wilquin, which showed from the very first number, opener Sons of Ignorance from debut album Engram of Decline.

Much, much more eagerly anticipated were the next act: German Dissection worshippers Thulcandra, fronted by Steffen Kummerer, who also heads up Obscura. Thulcandra, who took their name from an ancient Darkthrone demo — which in turn took its name from the word for Earth in C.S. Lewis’s sci-fi classic Out of the Silent Planet — have played here before, all the way back in June 2011 at Channel Zero. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then: the band put out Ascension Lost in 2015 and then went pretty quiet. Until this tour, which brought them back to Ljubljana and had the crowd hooked from the very first crusher, In the Realm of Thousand Deaths. A shame that three quarters of the stage was taken up by Sebastian Lanser’s (Obscura) enormous drum kit, leaving all four members of Thulcandra — including drummer Erebor — crammed right at the front edge. Not exactly a lot of room to move around, but the guys more than made up for it with their playing. Diabolically good playing, at that! In a sadly brief half hour, the Germans packed in tracks from all three albums; brilliant melodies poured from the fingers of the Kummerer/Delastik guitar duo like Lucifer cast from the heavens, while Erebor turned in an exceptional performance too, with some truly gorgeous cymbal work. The (all too) short set meant classics like Deliverance in Sin and Death and Frozen Kingdom flew by in a flash. They could have squeezed in at least Everlasting Fire — though Thulcandra did debut a new track, The Slithering Silver, from their upcoming album (good news, since nothing had been announced yet), which sounded solid for a first outing, before they said their goodbyes all too soon with the epic Spirit of the Night.

Also long awaited were Dutch death metal veterans God Dethroned, who last played here just under a year ago at Subart in Kranj alongside Suffocation and Belphegor. The Dutch returned with their brand-new album Illuminati and greeted the Ljubljana crowd with its title track. God Dethroned were similarly squeezed for stage space, but they too delivered the goods with flying colours, helped along by both a great sound and a responsive crowd — and despite the short time slot, the Dutch ploughed through Ort like the tracks of Mark IV and V tanks on the Western Front a hundred years ago. God Dethroned kicked off with Book of Lies, keeping the focus on the current album, before flooring everyone with the crushing The World Ablaze from the album of the same name, one third of their excellent World War I trilogy. Commanding the Dutch set with ease was Henri Sattler, the band’s sole remaining original member, his voice still powerful and intact, with not the slightest hint that he’s getting up there in years. The tightly drilled unit ground through Ort track by track and landed knockout blows with classic Villa Vampiria, No Man’s Land, and new track Spirit of Beelzebub, which hits outright epic live thanks to a chorus of clean backing vocals. God Dethroned were also frustratingly short-changed on time, and it all wrapped up too soon with the closing Nihilism.

Obscura were somewhat in the background this time around, given the support acts and the fact that we’ve seen them here quite a few times already — but they came out swinging from the very first note with arguably their biggest hit, Anticosmic Overload, and the nicely packed venue lost its mind. Obscura simply know their craft inside and out, as they proved once again, presenting in Ljubljana mainly the final chapter of their four-album cycle about nature, the cosmos, and mankind: Diluvium (diluvium being a geological term for the older epoch of the Quaternary, and also for the alluvial deposits from that era). In just over an hour, the Germans demonstrated inhuman tightness — whether in the shredding riffs and solos from the Kummerer/Rafael Trujillo guitar duo, the fingers of Linus Klausenitzer gliding across his fretless bass neck, or the seismic drumming of machine-man Sebastian Lanser. Unlike the support acts, the guys could actually make proper use of the stage, so we got a fair bit more (excessive) posing while standing on the monitor wedges. Obscura delivered a varied setlist this time, even reaching back to the underrated Retribution with Alone, and proved once again why they’re one of the most respected names in technical/progressive death metal.

Photos: Nina Grad