Tune in next week for the second installment of Mass Extermination Fest, this time featuring Supremative from Spain. “Spain” might be a bit too generic, since the band comes from the Canary Islands, where my well-off friends go to burn their bloody, utterly undeserved cash on the lifestyle they lead. But fine: in the end we like slaughter, and I doubt the band lives off rents from apartments leased to suckers.
Back to business: I’m guessing you want an opinion on the headliner, if you’re shortsighted enough to read this site and too lazy to do your own digging on Encyclopedia Metallum. I’ll tell you more: I think I’ll do a quick run-through of all the festival bands between now and next Saturday, so keep an eye on the new blog.
That three-color cover, which by now is basically the staple flag of that so-called bestial death subgenre cooked up at the start of the new millennium, already says almost everything worth knowing. Alessandro, the very young organizer of the fest, is a strong supporter of this stuff, and honestly it seems healthier than getting smashed into the ground on gin tonics in the Modena nightlife. We’re talking about that rotten strain of phlegmy, aspirated vocals that wheeze blasphemies over hammering, spiraling, hypnotic music. Some local names I won’t mention because it’s too obvious still pop into my head, like the famous Pink Elephant. I like this crap, obviously, as you already know. The album review is right below.
Barbarian is rawer than raw, abrasive metal from what I remember. I’ve seen him live a few times, and I’ve known these guys for longer than I’d like to admit. I remember their direction is more towards the primal energy of the first years of the genre than trying to go down the sink of systematic annihilation, but that is not a bad start.
Same goes for the awesome personal favorite that is Uraniavore Goatphago: more minimalistic than minimalist, completely undiluted cosmic chaos, basically a demi-glace reduction of Revenge concentrated right to the edge of recognizability.
Last, you might want to check out Dead Aeon Mist. He plays a genre that’s extremely hard to do properly without plunging into that easy, mass-market Swedish death metal sound. I heard some tracks in advance months ago, but I’m saving the final listen for the live show. I want a surprise.
But more than anything, next weekend I want to unplug from routine crap, so I’ll be drinking ethanol in various forms at the biker club where the show will be held. Come over and let’s talk gore, massacre, and demonic nihilism.
Jacques Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire Infernal (1863)
I’ve always had a thing for BEHERIT. It was one of those bands that shaped my early, swampy, miasmic idea of Finland I had when I was a kid and was fully into this music. For me Finland was this sort of misty, mossy, otherworldly place. I remember talking about them a lot with my friend Marco, who passed away way too early at 38. We both were kind of fascinated with the figure Holocausto and his works, for some reason we also thought he was way younger than he actually was. We imagined him fully sleeve-tattooed at 14 or something, which wasn’t even far from the truth—he was maybe 17 or 18 in those old zine photos, which already felt like some kind of extreme statement in any case. In any case, never in my life I hoped to have the chance to see these guys live one day. Things like this have a special inner meaning, you know. I FEEL these shows, deeply.
Of course I am now talking about that 1990–1991 era, what people always lump into the “Blasphemy phase”, but honestly that label always felt too tight for what they were doing. Sure, the aesthetics lined up, the irregular facepaint and all, but Beherit were doing Black Metal in a way that wasn’t about screeches and raw riffs post “Black Mark”. It was more like… Tapping into some kind of ancestral rot. A psychic tunnel into the wrong kind of transcendence. That terrifying feeling you get when you stare into a mirror just a second too long.
For me Beherit was always Metal of Death, as their song goes, a Death that defies the “color” black. Black Metal not as absence of light, but as the color beyond space. They’ve always dragged me into this liminal zone half Aramaic sorcery, half pre-human dread. A place where natural forces aren’t gentle or harmonious, but feral and menacing. Go there check on their whole discography and find a common thread and you’ll get what I mean. It’s somehow ironic but totally fitting that “beherit” is a term that comes from syriac, an aramaic language adopted by early christians. Syriac for Satan, generally speaking, but what if we interpret Satan not as an entity but as a passage to somewhere else? This is what for me Beherit delivers.
Strip away the dogma, and a deeper, older archetype begins to surface. Beherit can be reinterpreted through a mythopoetic framework: not as an embodiment of evil, but as the threshold guardian, the necessary resistance that marks the boundary between the known and the unknown. Within a gnostic vision, this opposition becomes sacred — a gate, not a wall. Beherit does not destroy; he transforms. He is the keeper of the liminal space, the one who confronts the seeker with his own fear and desire. To face Beherit is to undergo a spiritual ordeal, a confrontation with the shadow self that leads not to damnation but to revelation. In this sense, Beherit is not a figure to be feared, but a symbol of initiatic passage, the dark mirror through which one must pass to awaken.
The show last night felt exactly like I hoped. I didn’t expect a precise setlist or a brutal chaotic black metal performance. I wanted that fog, those distorted signals behind the veil, the oniric, whispered flutes and diagonal distortions with exotic scents of middle east. Add to that the haze of time, it’s been 35 years, man, and I’m suddenly back in my parents’ basement, reading xeroxed fanzines listening to worn demo tapes until 3 a.m., showing up half-dead to school the next day .
Because, you know, back then, all these bands spoke to us only through their songs, poorly translated lyrics, occasional interviews in weird typewritten fonts. You rarely knew what anyone even looked like. With Beherit it was even more mysterious. Those bad photocopies with the fucked-up facepaint, this sense of being part of a bigger dance. We were Devil, we spoke all the languages of the world under one conscience.
That’s the thing. Whether it’s Engram or Electric Doom Synthesis or the new live tracks there’s always been a thread. You tune into it or you don’t. Beherit speaks many languages, but all of them bring to the other side. A gray, decaying, ritualistic realm filled with cracked terracotta statues sunburnt into oblivion and skeletal men with blind eyes that point at you in your dreams.
It’s like those shepherd dogs in the Caucasus, nobody gives a shit what color they are, or the shape of their snout. It’s all about temperament and how well they do the job. That’s how Holocausto operates. He speaks whatever language is needed to keep the gate of nanna alive. A gate that has never been about a specific language. Maybe I am kinda overreading it you never know, but I kinda feel his work has always been a bit misunderstood. This guy also disappeared completely from the “scene” for years, sprouting all kinds of rumors. Yesterday somehow all fitted into place and it was a satisfying feeling.
The Show
Anyway, yeah other bands played too. Crowd was packed. A bunch of people I’d only ever known online, and even more I hadn’t seen in 20+ years. Which makes sense. We’re all prostate check generation now.
Devoid of Thought probably stood out most for me—everything Caligari touches has at least something intriguing. Extirpation were visually cool, like a mix between Nifelheim and Ultra Silvam, and the music was solid, intricate even. But holy fuck, that voice. Just this high-pitched flat line, like a screech owl that nested in my haybarn these days. After two songs I had to leave the room. It hit me like nails on a chalkboard. Sorry dude, if I want shrieking noise I’ll throw on Yamatsuka Eye. Gorrch were better than I expected. Honest stuff. Still can’t get into Italian lyrics in this genre, but whatever. It worked.
All in all, a great day. Another check on the list of bands I thought I’d never see. And yeah, maybe the place was overstuffed, maybe half the crowd didn’t even know what they were witnessing. But even that made sense. The packed crowd, the way the band was barely visible through the blue smoke, silhouettes like Pazuzu in The Exorcist… it felt like spending an hour in the underworld, surrounded by drifting, disfigured souls. People will talk but I will treasure the experience.
We all know that Metal = Beer (John McEntee’s quote, not mine*), but have you ever thought how similar these two worlds actually are?
Most good beers give their best when fresh and unoxidized, and more importantly, give their best when just bottled and should be drunk within a few weeks. Like all those bands that lose their polish and energy after a demo, or a few albums. When beer has reached proper fermentation it is bottled, when a group has reached compositional maturity it starts writing its own pieces. The majority of the most interesting groups peaked within 5 years of their formation, just as most beers peaked within the first few weeks. Some, very rare ones, such as certain Belgian beers, withstand the passage of time even improving, but eventually they all come to a meager end. Some groups, even rarer, need a moment of refinement and after an album or two discover their true identity, somewhat like certain beers that need to mature a few years to reach the roundness of their flavors and fragrances. Like the beers, most groups could just follow the production specification with barley malt (or other grains) before getting into some bullshit with honey, flavorings, and herbs that in most cases don’t work. As with bands, most beers that try too hard suck dick. Making a beer with modern, experimental methods often serves only as an exercise in style especially if you don’t know their past just like groups that experiment the fuck out without having a solid identity yet. As one for beer that no one feels like criticizing, the concept also applies to top groups that are very clever and very trendy but underneath prove once again that the king is naked. As with beers, some groups that manage to find their own identity then overdo it, get caught up in an omnipotence complex and screw it up. Then there are the sours, which rediscover flavors forgotten for decades, but you have to be very good to make them critically and have a lot of taste as well as technique, but which then when the chemistry is right discover a niche of true admirers. Just like some groups. Just as with beers there are the periods when one or the other is in fashion, and they all try to do the same thing but few manage to make something that works without too much pretension, just as with musical genres, perhaps fishing randomly from the past.
Ultimately though, as with beers, everyone will appreciate whatever the fuck they like at home because a beer, like a record, is a moment of relaxation and evasion.
Gutted was one of the first record labels that released a bunch of 7″s of the first wave of Death Metal from its headquarters in Illinois back in the early 1990’s. In Italy, probably due to Contempo and Nosferatu, we saw most of these in stock in basically every catalog that circulated in those years, and don’t get me started on how many Internal Bleeding flyers we got in every envelope when tapetrading. A couple of catalog numbers were reused used when the label changed its name to Metal Merchants, although I never understood what happened to GR006 (if you know, please write me at nuclearabominations@gmail.com). I originally intended to take a photo of the records but my 7″s are not currently in the best condition in terms of sorting and cataloging. Maybe I’ll catch up later. Maybe.
GR001
The first 7″ that was released on Gutted let’s face it, was not that great. An unripe band that in its earlier form was trying to find out its identity and decided to do so with a couple of demos and this 7″ of Death Metal all chunks and bites, as they used to do in the early 90s where giving two chugs that today we would call “slam” was tantamount to being hard and heavy. Not so, this proto-slam borrowed from Hard Core Punk works 1% of the times, the rest being boring shit that in some years would lead to aberrations like Machine Head and co.
GR002
To say that I was surprised when I saw that Symphony of Grief was still around in 2022 would not be true, the band was excellent and I remember well at the time this 7″ came out that they were determined to continue, pursuing a contract with a label, on their musical path (they wrote me too even if I didn’t have a label at the time). I’m going from memory but it seems to me that Frank from Voices from the Darkside managed this band along with Immolation in the early ’90s, which should be enough to recognize that they were a band with the right numbers. But to find out that they have made ELEVEN albums, well that just left me dumbfounded. I haven’t felt like listening to the latest stuff because I have long since dropped that early curiosity for the more mellifluous Death Metal-related genres (imagine the enthusiasm I have for the post-O’Malley crap) although I think I’ll provide out of curiosity in the next few days.
GR003
Leaving behind Laceration/Symphony of Grief in Illinois, with Eternal Torment our own Gutted Records resumes a path begun with Laceration (badly) in the city where Suffocation, Pyrexia, Internal Bleeding really perfected that kind of Death Metal all elbow and spade strokes: New York. It’s not like it takes much to figure out where this band is coming from, because every stone-scraping instant calls out to NYDM, with that dirty “Human Waste”-type pitch. I grew bored of the evolution of this genre somewhere during the turn of the millennium, but I still like to listen to these bands sometimes. For the lovers of this more angular and squared breed of Death Metal, this is a band to rediscover.
GR004
I’m not going to lie I’m not a fan of Acheron, they have the kind of ideas and stylistic solutions that for some reason a great many people like but to me seem bafflingly banal, not to mention a singing style that goes nowhere. For being 1992 in Florida, though, this 7″ has a point. I think their best efforts came out much later in their career though and their latest album on Listenable was one of the best works they have done. Still, we are talking about that moment in history when Black Metal was changing its skin becoming a genre in its own right proproposed in those years, from a purely scholastic point of view these are recordings that should at least be known. These guys hated Christianity with quite some passion.
GR005
This 7″ was released on Metal Merchant but having still a code number starting with “GR” I thought I would include it here. In the beginning Funeral Nation was a Venom/Sodom-inspired band that somehow transitioned into the Professor K machine along with Rigor Mortis, a strange version of a particularly raw Thrash Metal that over the years has unfortunately lost some of that more primitive and barbaric vein typical of that genre, just like Sodom, to say. Yet here the band was at the top of its game, and the 7″ is particularly beautiful to have, ivory-white and with nursery-level illustrations. Probably one of my favorite recordings by Funeral Nation.
GR007
I talked about NYDM earlier when I mentioned Eternal Torment and here we are, talking about the masters of a genre that may not be my favorite but that until the arrival of Deeds of Flesh, which changed the game cards forever, stood in stark contrast to the bands going queer and the whole melodic goth strand that was slowly eating all extreme genres from within, from Black Metal to even the whole HC/Punk world with their internalist “emo” variants (no, not “that” emo, but distantly related in spirit). So here is a handful of songs that you could basically hear in different releases on different labels, chugging shit with their bossy NY accent. And their flyers were killer, I wish I could find some in my boxes one day to scan.
GR008
Another Metal Merchant release, filthy raw and cheesy like all the very early Meat Shits. Here we hear them in their less noisy version with shitty riffs and great vocals bringing it all together. Worth noting is the cover art by Rob Smits who had already done the 7″ Broken Hope, Excavation, etc. We were all collecting all Meat Shits releases back then, don’t be fooled by anyone who tells otherwise. They went a bit over the top with sensitive 2000-something sensibilities AH AH AH AH. But yeah, I think these vocals are so SICK for the genre. Great stuff as usual for all earlier Meat Shits releases.
I’ve probably never seen as many concerts in a row as I did the last couple of months (at least after 2004), which is especially strange because I’ve also begun to appreciate them again whereas for years the titanic battle between couch and pain in the ass in the car had always ended in favor of the former. To be fair, all the last few concerts I saw had a percentage of interesting bands above 50 percent, and at least something to see on stage in terms of set design and presence. The night of Saturday was among them, with an interesting surprise as well. Usual urban location with a handful of scattered headbangers, a low turnout but unfortunately it was to be expected.
VomitmantiK
I will not spend many words on the wild and ferocious horde that is VOMITMANTIK because they recently released the CD on the label (allow me an invitation to buy a copy though), except that it was the first time I had seen them live outside of a rehearsal room. The keyword definition here is crude barbarity. VomitmantiK is a rough embryo that draws its strength from being primitive, from that atavistic, primal ferocity that embodies the instincts of the woods, the totemic bloodlust of ferocious beasts that feed on carcasses and entrails. Hammer and nails: simple tools for channeling instinct into massive, direct songs. Powerful and raw, as the genre must be.
Hellcrash
Here is where the evening took an unpredictable direction. I was imagining yet another Australian-like nostalgia product that might end up on the endless roster of photocopy bands on Iron Bonehead or Unspeakable Axe, but on the contrary, things went in a totally different direction. I had heard a few of their songs on the fly online in the past and was not particularly impressed, even after a quick review in the last few days to see if anything had changed.
Seeing HELLCRASH live, however, has been an entirely different matter. This group rocked the stage to fucking splinters. Even if my infatuation with thrash/speed metal wore off fast around 1992 when the genre had lost that raw polish that made albums by bands like Whiplash, Razor or Rigor Mortis timeless classics that still give me the sudden rush of twenty energy drinks, and honestly never came back despite various more or less pathetic revivals (don’t get me started on Earache bands). Yet, evidently, the magic in the genre is not gone forever because Hellcrash’s set was devastating. The arena that somewhat encapsulates all the obvious influences is Possessed and Venom but within the continuous shredding coexisted instances of Blood Feast, Exciter, Sadus, early Whiplash etc. It’s interesting to witness how simple things always work, at the end of the day you never get tired of eating bread after all. Square and precise, textbook stage presence, studs and leather, a drummer who crashed the skins like a poacher clubbing a baby seal, Becerra/Cronos-esque throaty vocals, spread-legged headbanging, and everything else that could serve the cause. If they pass through your area, don’t miss their show.
Goat Vomit Noise
GOAT VOMIT NOISE, on the other hand, is a very strange beast. If the first two bands took you into the comfort zone, here we are talking about somebody that manages to put together a unique compositional style even if clearly inspired in spurts by this or that other sound, a bit like what happened in the days of NEFAS, when you knew exactly the language, but could not recognize the words. The concert was airless the whole time, there is not a moment of melody or breathing in the whole set. It’s a bit like walking through some post-apocalyptic, gray, lifeless urban scenery, gasping for some air or fresh water. I had listened to some interesting things online before, but let me say that after witnessing this set I now believe that speaking of Black Metal this is one of the ten most interesting bands we have in this country right now. Having a look at the performance on stage, once again, allowed me to box the view into a whole different perspective. Goat Vomit Noise’s world has no color or hope. It is a finite, bleak black granite wasteland where the only life left is armored and covered with fangs. It is indeed an experience to follow the monolithic, inescapable flow through GVN’s circles of lifeless hell. Excellent.
Slaughter Messiah
I took no pictures of Slaughter Messiah because I left the room halfway through the first song. Uninspired, boring, and derivative second-grade black/thrash with riffs so overcooked and overdone you could grate parmesan on them and cook everything in the oven the day after an hangover. This is the kind of band I was mentioning above, that adds nothing to the music world. Which was doubly weird since they were headliners too. All form, no meat. Nice packaging and merch, but apart from that, there was nothing substantial to sink your teeth into.
I’ve been working in IT most of my life and I am not extraneous to the concept of hacking which sounds better than “anally drilling out the reasons why some experiences do work while some others fail”. Yesterday’s concert was actually a big win for me and I will try to understand why did it work so well, and ultimately consider if this is the right dimension for post-pandemic shows.
My old friend Paolo from Coagulated rex bundled the ultimate Black Metal lineup for the night by sewing three top-tier barbwire unholy monstrosities with as much stage presence as infernal sound. Does this ring Black Metal, anyone?
The show was closed to random people, factually restricting the invitations to those actually interested in the show, which was partly a bureaucratic decision but nonetheless a strong message I could relate to, akin to what we did with the Nuclear the Abominations fest 2 years ago. The venue was small and clean, with astoundingly decent toilets, which is something I am graciously obsessed with: THANK you for letting me piss and shit without being hauled in a dimension out of Kapala-Tetragrammacide lyrics minus the aliens. Also, the beer served was quite good and not the usual shitty carbonated dishwasher water you get in bigger venues for ridiculous prices, which is another big thumb up.
On the downside, if I had to find a major flaw in the evening the overall sound was tragically confused. Given the chaotic nature of the music, the result was a giant wall of slurred noise in which basically you couldn’t understand half a shit. Which – at the end of the day – could have been far more tragic if the three bands had not been able to create that kind of suffocating atmosphere of combat shock: the fixed red lights, the stage set, the putrid energy reverberating in the air was really the perfect storm.
So was the shitty sound so much of a problem? Hell NO. Because Black Metal is never about the single riff, it’s about the overall EXPERIENCE. You listen to a Profanatica record, close your eyes and you’re taken to hell. But what about a show? Is it the same as listening to the same record at home? Nope. You go to a show to live some first-person experience and here I am answering myself from the latest grognard posts. Shows like the one I attended yesterday are the reason why shows DO actually still make sense today. It’s not just the music. You get a completely new dimension, like a 4-D cinema when you see something like that. You’re literally submerged in the music, INTO the songs. Eyes, ears, and skin, all harmonically convey the same message. It’s being alive and part of what’s going on in the moment. So no, the sound, shitty as it was, was just a part of the whole.
The second flaw one could point out is that everybody already knew each other, so it was basically a high-school meeting with band shirts. But is that a problem? Did the decision of a private party actually bar anyone from attending? Did id lack in (AH AH AH) “Inclusivity”? Well, you bet it did, ah ah. And you know what? Fuck it! Not because we’re elite, but because selecting dedicated people led to a perfectly balanced night where everyone was accountable for himself and his friends. Which is cool, because it did not really actually bar anybody to come, it just put some first-level funneling into the process. The people that were invited in turn consciously invited other people, there was a first-level connection with at least someone in the show, and I am certain if someone new to this music wanted to attend, nobody would have raised any objections. Despite what one might think, this is an open, welcoming environment, if you’re not a cunt. So no, this second objection doesn’t really work either.
Yesterday’s show was like being catapulted into Jacob’s Ladder under Pervitin.
Uraniavore Goatphago have been the first shock of the horrors of war when adrenaline first hits the brain. VomitVulva were the slaughter in the trenches, where shrapnel made your friends’ limbs fly and covered you in guts. Sadomortuary took the souls of the dead to hell, while the bodies afield were eaten by mutant Armageddon cannibals.
Uraniavore Goatphago
First time I see the awesome Uraniavore Goatphago and I was blown away bt the sheer static barbarity this duo manages to compress on stage. It’s the kind of brutal primitive violence of late Deranged turned black by the Blasphemachine. Horrific noise wall vibrating destruction.
VomitVulva
VomitVulva were the perfect choice to jump from the solid berm of the Uraniavore Goatphago directly into the thick of the carnage. The stage was filled with something that looked more like a narcos squad than a group of musicians. A chaotic mass of riffs, profanity, STDs, and shitty booze. This is what you need when you have to tie together the show.
Sadomortuary
And then, it was Sadomortuary again. The effluvia of the crypt solidified on stage like Ossorio’s blind dead at dawn. If we take away the new hipster nuance of the term “ritualistic”, it would be the right one to describe the interminable minutes of inevitable hooded DEATH that were punctuated by the band that in my opinion best represents Black Metal in this country today.
I don’t have much more to add, I hope that this evening will set a school and that there may be more such evenings. If so, I will gladly go back and get my bloated old ass out of the door.
A collaboration between two of the most stalwart Italian labels who in spite of everything and inexplicably manage to maintain enthusiasm for such an unprofitable genre. Despise the Sun from the capital and Terror from Hell from the northwest join forces for these two discographies (only on CD I think, for the moment) of two bands that may be little known outside the underground environment of the early 90s.
Iconoclast came from my hometown and among their various releases include a 7″ on the famous Drowned records. Inspired by the Greek and English scene of the time, they played a type of Death Metal with vaguely melodic but malevolent overtones.
On Funeral Oration there would be no need for an introduction, Nicola Curry’s of Metal Destruction zone appear on legendary covers from the time and his fanzine is still a legend for those like me who devoured every issue. He’s still active as an artist today, by the way.
