Venue: Arena / Vienna / Austria
Concert date: November 17, 2010
Attendance: 300
Ticket price: €19 (presale) / €24 (day of show)
What’s better than a pre-Christmas death metal package? Nothing! Anyone who gives a damn about death metal had to be there. But to the disappointment of all of us who showed up, the turnout was very, very, very low.
Missing Job For A Cowboy and Whitechapel on the same bill is pretty much a sin. Your loss, posers!
For openers we got an aperitif called Trigger The Bloodshed, who spread evil and destruction on stages all over the world. England has no good modern metal, you say? Not true. There’s a whole sea of it, and TTB definitely belong in the mix. Starting out with deathcore and moving on to death metal is a real turnaround, in a good way. They surprise on record, and they surprise on stage. On September 16 you (we) also had the chance to catch them in Ljubljana, but in Vienna they drew a somewhat bigger crowd than Ljubljana could muster. The guys take the job seriously, as they should. And no show is complete without the movie-style intros. Just like in Ljubljana, they used those sound sequences in Vienna too, and they spiced things up nicely. Nothing to complain about. These guys saw, slaughter, butcher and devour everything in front of them. Vocalist Jonny Burgan and lead guitarist/backing vocalist Rob Purnell complement each other perfectly and create a proper atmosphere of war and carnage, of spilled blood. To make it all complete, Dan Wilding barricaded himself behind the drums, better known to the crowd as the former drummer of Belgian death/grind legends Aborted. Let’s not drag it out. The guys played great, punchy and violent. Well worth seeing if they ever play anywhere near you.
After the aperitif, it’s only proper to serve the appetizer! This time the tour named theirs Annotations Of An Autopsy, or AOAA for short. Just like TTB, AOAA come from the island kingdom and are one more proof that England has good modern metal bands. These slightly more hefty lads hit the stage with grim looks and we knew exactly what time it was. They started hammering their instruments like there was no tomorrow. The instrumental side isn’t anything special on its own. The repetitive “breakdowns” all night lull you a bit, but Steve Regan’s voice carries three villages over. Since with modern bands we’re used to “inhale growling” and “pig squealing”, AOAA smash that stereotype. Steve literally pulls off a mix of pig and ox vocals. At times it’s downright terrifying. The guys blasted away for a good half hour and before long it was time for them to stop. The little “moshers” were bummed because they had nothing left to dance to, or to flail their arms and kick the air and everyone around them to, and the rest of us were bummed because we were enjoying the music itself. Everything ends sometime, and the AOAA show had to end too. A tip for the guys: play a bit faster and you’ll be shredding people’s skulls.
Now that the aperitif and appetizer were down, it was time for the main course (in most people’s opinion). The tour came up with an exceptionally good recipe and served it to us as Whitechapel. These masters of deathcore (again, the majority opinion) came from the land where milk and honey flow for this genre (the USA), determined to light up the rest of 2010 for every fan of the style. So what makes Whitechapel so special? Three guitars and a small, angry vocalist, of course. You could call them the modern death metal Iron Maiden. As befits their show, they walk onstage and start burning with no intro whatsoever. The three guitars do their thing, the angry bassist furiously swings his instrument around, and the new drummer breathed some fresh air into the band, since original drummer Kevin Lane sadly couldn’t make the tour. But what makes the Whitechapel boys so special and interesting is vocalist Phil Bozeman. The man ripped the underwear off everyone in the room, in a way that the earlier AOAA could only dream of. The weak spot of Whitechapel’s set was losing the growl in the middle of the growl itself. But we can’t hold that against him, since he walked onstage sleepless and wrecked after an 8-hour drive from Switzerland. To make things even worse, they were traveling in vans because there was no tour bus. Still, the crowd didn’t let it throw them and went wild along with the singer. Sadly, the fun lasted only 45 minutes. Of course Whitechapel didn’t let the crowd cool off, serving up the hit This Is Exile. A thoroughly convincing performance!
And what was cooking for the after-dinner treat, in the form of dessert? This one was something special. Your tiramisus and Sacher tortes hide in shame next to what we got. Do I even need to say it? This dessert goes by the name Job For A Cowboy. The epic intro and the band’s entrance were the signal to go on combat alert. The band cuts loose, the hall boils over. The sawing of modern death metal, which pulls more “old school” with every new song, was the real phenomenon of the night. The instrumentalists did their job superbly, unlike bassist Brent Riggs, who more or less strutted around the stage like a model, showing off his rooster tuft of hair.
Vocalist Jonny Davy was a bit of a letdown too with his “scream”, which sounded like the yapping of a tiny little dog. The praiseworthy “growl” lived up to every expectation, but the screams fell a little short, and on that front our cowboys stayed on Whitechapel’s level. Jonny made things worse by “fueling up” on whiskey onstage, which is death for the vocal cords. That definitely hurts Jonny, unlike Lemmy (Motörhead), who can only keep up the nastiness of his legendary rasp that way. We somehow survived this (lovely) yapping, and by every other measure the show was, all in all, very solid and well worth seeing and hearing. Fingers crossed JFAC make it to our neck of the woods in the near future. If they do, I’ll be begging local promoters to ban Jonny from entering any liquor store whatsoever. Thanks for understanding.
With JFAC, our dinner came to an end. Stuffed with a hefty dose of death metal and with smiles on our faces, we slowly made our way to the car and then home to Slovenia. The night served up a proper “pounding” and a total massacre. Clearly the famous words of (in)famous rap/hardcore crew Deez Nuts had rubbed off on this event: “Tonight we’re gonna party like there’s no tomorrow”.
photos: Tjaša Saje
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