We saw Alice in Chains at GM Place tonight. It was the first time I’d ever seen them and they were very good. Mastodon bored me to death and I slept through the Deftones, so I don’t know anything about their performance or setlist. Back to Alice. The new singer, William DuVall was alright. He wasn’t as bleak as I’d hoped, initially coming across as a happy guy doing his job. He did hit most of Staley’s notes, but in some parts he failed noticeably.

The setlist for the show was:

• Them Bones
• Dam That River
• Rain When I Die
• Check My Brain
• Your Decision
• No Excuses
• Grind
• We Die Young
• Acid Bubble
• Lesson Learned
• Junkhead
• Rooster
• Black Gives Way to Blue
• Man in the Box
• Would

A pretty solid setlist, with the only possible improvement being the addition of more stuff off Facelift.

The Last.fm playlist is supposedly what’s played around the Last.fm HQ in London, UK. This week they must have had a metal intern or something. Look at the regular sort of music they listen to, the Top Tracks, the artists in the library  and then look at this week’s top artists.

If Last.fm lasts a thousand years, men will still say “This was their finest hour”.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of seeing Nile AND Immolation live, in concert, together. It was an evening of untrammeled brutality and ferocity, easily the best tour of the year so far. I know, I know, the year is only 28 days old.

We got to the venue, El Corazon in Seattle, around 7.30. A smallish venue, but it held enough souls to make the experience enjoyable. I bought a Nile t-shirt, as well as an Immolation t-shirt from Ross himself. The man is funny, and has a hell of a roar.

First up was Evangelist, a local Seattle band. I wasn’t too impressed with them, but they were alright for an opening band. They served their purpose by getting the crowd warmed up. The lead singer had a Pharaonic headdress on, ostensibly as homage to Nile. Anyhow, they were soon done their small set and the next band came on.

The next band was The Dreaming Dead and boy, were they great! A fine four-piece from Los Angeles, the lead, rhythm and vocal duties were handled by two ladies, while men handled the skins and basslines. A refreshing change to see more women in the scene and these two could really play. They were tight and impressed everyone there. Their setlist consisted of a few good songs, but sadly I didn’t write them down. However, I do plan on checking some more of their discography out, and you might like them too, if melodic death metal is your cup of tea.

On to Krisiun. Proudly sporting a Schizophrenia t-shirt, the boys from Brazil made short work of a brutal set. Krisiun is another of those bands that produce a wall of sound that is not easily penetrated by casual fans. However, I am just that, so the setlist may be a little incorrect or incomplete. They played:

Combustion Inferno

Wrath

Refusal

Sentenced Morning

Meaning of Terror

During the set, the drummer had some troubles with his set, and we were treated to some flashy guitar wanking courtesy of the lead axeman, who distracted us from the ineptitude of the drum tech. Soon, order was restored, more invectives were hurled, the brotherhood of metal was saluted and the thrash train from Brazil was back on the tracks. After their blistering set, which set the crowd a’moshing, we had the the mighty Immolation take the stage. They were greeted as heroes and launched into their only-too-short set. We were treated to:

Passion Kill

The Devil I Know (? Not sure about this one)

The Purge (new song off upcoming Majesty and Decay album!)

Den of Thieves

Burial Ground

World Agony

Immolation is a band I’ve never seen before and they did not disappoint. I wish they’d played songs with more groove, but one cannot have everything. I’m a fan of their devastating time-shifts which are brutally graceful. Let’s face it, their rhythm section is like a panzer ballet and while obliterating everything in its path, is yet catchy enough to hum in the shower. Maybe next time, with a longer set, Immolation will grace us with a few more songs. The t-shirt I bought:

That’s right kiddies. Can you hear us, Death to Jesus. A firm stand against theistic satanism, as my friend Geoff put it.

The chronometer ticked away, it was nigh 10 PM and the one and only Nile took the stage. A sterling intro set the stage for what was coming. We see metal bands covering classical pieces all the time, but they either speed it up or ruin it with their vocals, but in this case, Nile nailed the cover of Holst’s Mars, the Bringer of War. Without further ado, here’s the set that killed The Heart:

Rameses, the Bringer of War

Kafir!

Dusk Falls Upon The Temple Of The Serpent On The Mount Of Sunrise

Sacrifice Unto Sebek

Hittite Dung Incantation

Kudurru Maqlu

Serpent Headed Mask

Ithyphallic

Execration Text

Papyrus Containing The Spell To Preserve Its Possessor Against Attacks From He Who Is In The Water (easily the longest name of any song I’ve seen live)

Fourth Arra of Dagon

Return to the Underworld

Sarcophagus

Lashed to the Slave Stick

Cast Down the Heretic

Black Seeds of Vengeance

An excellent show, with a very strong finisher. A lot of superb songs off In Their Darkened Shrines, which is my favourite slab o’wax. Execration Text was an unexpected bonus, definitely not a song I expected to see live. I find the title track off Ithyphallic a bit drawn-out, but Papyrus… is a superlative track, one whose chorus had everyone singing along. Who knew that songs about ancient mutterings to escape crocodiles would be so catchy 7000 years after they were written.

If you’ve heard the last 5 minutes of Fourth Arra of Dagon, you know that the ending is anthemic. Simple but effective. Here’s a video of the last minute or so of it, the chanting is superb, we’re treated to some vocal crowd control, courtesy of the boys from South Carolina.

Here’s the other t-shirt I bought. Yes, it’s good to be a metalhead fanboy all over again. Dallas Toler-Wade cut his hair and looks a bit like Uncle Fester, complete with grimaces and all. The overall experience of watching Nile live was excellent. They played Sarcophagus live, which is easily one of their best songs ever, despite being one of the slower ones in their repertoire.

All in all, a great night for brutal death metal and well worth the drive down to Seattle. Here’s to the next show, may it be as good as this one.

Ye gods, what a terrific slab o’ wax!

The new Nile album was released on Nov 3rd and I got it on Nov 6th. After spinning it nonstop from then until now, I feel I’m qualified to write a review.

The album starts with Kafir!, which is Arabic for “Nonbeliever” or “Infidel” or some other quaint concept. An excellent intro riff, with some standard Middle-Eastern sounding chants, juxtaposed with Nile’s typical brutality. The refrain of “There is No God but God” is taken from the Koran and is probably meant to symbolize the Islamic takeover of Egypt. However, this happened thousands of years after the Pharaohs, so the conection is tenuous at best. Either way, the song is a crusher, if historically inaccurate.

Hittite Dung Incantation and Utterances of the Crawling Dead have sinuous main riffs that get your foot tapping. At blistering speeds of 400 mph, the rhythm section weaves like a wounded tiger in the long grass. Great stuff.

The title track is pretty strong, with a fairly typical Nile-esque refrain.

4th Arra of Dagon wins points for the Lovecraftian reference. The ending, starting 5:29 is simple but very effective, easily the catchiest part on the whole album. Where does Karl come up with these riffs?

Permitting…. is the speediest song on an album with no slow parts. Some very fine technical brutal death metal, for you novitiates. A marked contrast to Yezd…., which is all slow drums and meant to be some sort of funeral drum dirge. Melancholy and making full use of those chants again, stuff like this is Nile’s trademark.

Kem Khefa Kheshef is solid, merrilly drilling its way into your brain as it winds its way to completion. Kollias is a monster! The Eye of Ra is another blistering track, none of that soft stuff on this track.

Iskander D’hul Karnon is a very strong finish to a monstrous album. “Alexander in Karnak”? I don’t know, maybe no one does. We have the little hammer off at the end of a riff, followed by a slower part that slowly speeds up and gives us an excellent end to a bodacious album. If the long slide reminds you of Annihilation of the Wicked, well, that’s a good thing, right?

4.5 stars out of 5

Billed as the “Most Extreme Metal Tour of 2009″ and sponsored by such heavies as MetalSucks.net, the Summer Slaughter tour of 2009 was a mix of many things. It was long, from 2 PM to 12 AM, a full 10 hours of death metal goodness. We got to the King Cat theatre in Seattle around 4, missing some of the earlier bands. No great loss.

The first band that we saw and liked was Dying Fetus. They were considerably better than their prior brethren, but still ho-hum in parts. After Dying Fetus was Origin. I had had high hopes for Origin. Often spoken of in the same hushed tones normally reserved for Nile or Decapitated, Origin unfortunately failed to deliver. The drummer definitely showcased his prodigious skill, but it overshadowed all the other instruments. Crappy sound quality ruined what might have been a great performance. It just came across as a giant wall of sound, and not in the good Cryptopsy wall-of-sound way either. Here are two songs I could identify:

• Finite
• Wrath of Vishnu

We had a quick dinner after that and returned for the final four bands, the ones that would make it all worthwhile.

Darkest Hour was up first. Some fairly typical NWOSDM, except 14 years too late. However, the frontman had energy and got the crowd going.

Ensiferum was the odd one out. Dressed in Finnish flag kilts and boasting a stripe of black paint on their faces, they did their sound check in Finnish. They were all shirtless, except for the cute female keyboard player, who was the one person everyone wanted to see shirtless, of course. They rocked through their power-metalesque titled set and were actually quite good live. I forget the song names, but they had the crowd chanting the refrains in Finnish for some songs too, no mean feat.

Finally, around 9, Suffocation took the stage. Frank was in a bad mood and was visibly worked up about the venue. “What the fuck is up with these lights, they’re really gonna make a lose it”, and “The sound quality in this stage is the worst I’ve ever heard. If you think it sounds great, that’s fine, if not, come up here on stage and let me know how it sounds, it fucking sucks from here”. One sterling quote was “You got to see 13 death metal bands tonight for 25 bucks as part of the death metal stimulus package”. Other choice gems include “You know the end of the world is coming. Go out there and get lots of guns and lots of ammo. You know you don’t wanna be the guy sitting down at the breakfast table with only one bullet when the motherfuckers break into your house”. If Frank was serious and not merely facetious, that’s quite disappointing. Needless paranoia is just that, needless! Anyhow, Frank channeled his hate into the setlist, which simply exploded off the stage. The highlight of the night was a full circle pit. Not just the first 4 rows moshed, but the entire venue, something I’ve never seen before. Frank knows how to work up the crowd like no other. Anyway, here’s the setlist:

• Catatonia
• Effigy of the Forgotten
• Blood Oath
• Infecting the Crypts
• Habitual Infamy
• Cataclysmic Purification
• Jesus Wept

A very good setlist, 2 new songs. Of course, I would have loved “Breeding the Spawn” or “Despise the Sun”, but one can’t have everything. I ran up and touched Frank’s hand in the post-show aftermath, a very fanboy thing to do, but the guy’s a metal legend, alright.

After some delays, Necrophagist took the stage. While clearly talented and technically proficient, after Suffocation, it was like staring at the wooden face of Steven Seagal. In their defense, they were late and pressed for time and they professionally went through their set, spitting out track after track of melodic technical death with machine-gun precision. But the crowd control was missing and some people even left during the show. I enjoyed Necrophagist a lot, but they were still second to Suffo’s performance, in my estimation. Muhammad barely spoke to the crowd, just yelling out “Thank you Seattle” and “Here’s $song_name, Seattle” in between songs. Here’s their setlist:

• Stabwound
• Foul Body Autopsy
• The Stillborn One
• Intestinal Incubation
• Diminished to B
• Some new song
• Seven
• Ignominous and Pale
• Only Ash Remains
• Fermented Offal Discharge

A very good setlist, then again, they only have 2 albums, so it was bound to be full of songs from them.

One slightly disappointing issue about the show was the quality of the swag. Most of the tshirts weren’t that great and it was just a big let-down. This is the complete opposite of usually every other show, where you only have 30 bucks and have to decide between 5 killer tees. That being said, I managed to find a decent Suffo tshirt to add to my collection.

As for the non-metal bits of the day, they were great too. It was a balmy 28 degrees, not a cloud in sight and Seattleites were out in force on their Independence Day eve. We saw a bit of Pike Market (a perennial favourite, but horribly crowded), and walked up and down the piers and did the usual touristy stuff: burgers, beer and postcards.

Well, it wasn’t quite Clash of the Titans, but it was close. In all likelihood, a Clash of the Titans for the younger generations who missed the real one. Wednesday night was when Megadeth and Slayer played together in almost two decades. The openers, Suicide Silence and Machinehead were ho hum. Machinehead used to slay, when they were called Vio-Lence. Check out Eternal Nightmare for some ripping thrash and Gaelic-accented vocals.

The best band tonight was definitely Slayer. Their setlist was:

• Disciple
• Jihad
• War Ensemble
• Chemical Warfare
• Ghosts of War
• Dead Skin Mask
• Live Undead
• Hell Awaits
• Psychopathy Red
• Mandatory Suicide
• Angel of Death
• Raining Blood
• South of Heaven

Some pretty good songs on there, along with the typical must-plays. I’m so disappointed, another Slayer show and nothing off Divine Intervention. Oh well, we got 4 songs off South, we should be happy. Araya was his usual paternal self, launching into Mandatory Suicide with: “Would you die for freedom? Would you do what the people of Iran are doing? They’re committing…..Mandatory Suicide”.

Megadeth was up next. Mustaine is still a a pompous twat, referring to the other bands as: “We’re playing tonight with Slayer, Machinehead and S…..uicide Silence”. Perhaps one day Araya can settle his hash. Deth’s setlist:

• Sleepwalker
• Wake Up Dead
• Hangar 18
• Peace Sells…
• She-wolf
• Kick the Chair
• Head Crusher
• Symphony of Destruction
• Skin O’ My Teeth
• In My Darkest Hour
• Holy Wars…

Not too bad, but plenty of stuff you’ll dislike if you stopped liking them after 1991. Watching Hangar 18 live reminds you of when you discovered Megadeth at 15 and tried to play it, but realized how insanely beyond your capabilities it was! Oh well, the band rolls on.

All in all, a good show. Slayer’s sound wasn’t as good as Megadeth’s, but those are petty gripes. 80 bucks is pricey but it brought out some of the best 80s thrash still alive today.

Next show: Necrophagist + Suffocation. Should be a blast.

With two free tickets to Chris Cornell at the Commodore, how could I resist? My friend Schmidty and I showed up late, yet didn’t miss any of the openers. What luck. The Crash Kings were first, and were alright, closing with a cover of War Pigs. No axeman, but the lead keyboardist compensated with enough phallic manoeuvres to fool any of us.

That’s it, one opener and then Cornell came on. He was excellent, I must admit I didn’t know anything new after 1996. I’d never liked Audioslave and I have no idea what he’s doing now, but he must be doing well to be touring.

Anyway, like the majority of people there, I was there for the Soundgarden songs. Here’s a brief setlist of the ‘Garden tunes he played:

• Fell on Black Days
• Blow Up the Outside World
• Outshined
• Rusty Cage
• Hunger Strike (Temple of the Dog, but who’s complaining)
• Black Hole Sun
• Like Suicide

The highlight of the night was Schmidty walking around with the N95 mask..

I lost count of how many people who came up to me, on Granville and elsewhere, asking me what was wrong with him. In the Commodore itself, people thought he was nuts. I patiently explained to everyone who asked that he’d just come back from Mexico and that he was feeling a bit under the weather (a blatant untruth). Schmidty often piped in with “It’s more for you than for me”. Apparently, the N95 really stinks after a few hours of use, but oh well. Schmidty did his bit to spread a bit of panic about the swine flu and a good time was had by all.

This makes the last two bands I’ve seen start with CC, Cannibal Corpse and Chris Cornell. All I need is for Cephalic Carnage to go on tour and my alliterative triplet is complete.

Thanks to Schmidty for the pictures.

It’s been a while since discovering a new band has given me so much pleasure. When I was a kid, it was Nirvana, then Slayer, then Death, then Morbid Angel…and so on. Now it’s Kronos.

Hailing from France, Kronos is a brutal death metal band that focuses almost exclusively on Greek mythology. If you ever liked reading up on ancient mythologies: Greek, Roman, Indian, Egyptian etc… you’ll love the lyrical themes behind Kronos’ songs. Of course, deciphering the vocals is a different matter altogether. Song names such as “Ouranian Cyclops” and album names such as “The Hellenic Terror” allude to all sorts of Hellenic goodness within. And for the non-mythologically inclined, there are a few traditional DM song titles such as “Suffocate the Ignorant”. Stirring stuff!

These guys put the “brutal” in brutal death metal. It’s on par with some of my favourite bands such as Nile or Cryptopsy. If you like extreme metal, check them out. They simply slay.

This about sums it up. Click to enlarge.

Good exposure for a band most people have never heard of.

By KELEFA SANNEH
Published: November 8, 2007

ALLENTOWN, Pa., Nov. 7 — On Tuesday night, in a plush tour bus parked in this city’s scruffy downtown, a couple of Norwegians were talking about world music. They were talking about the competing musical traditions of Norway and Sweden. They were talking about Icelandic linguistics and Viking mythology. They were talking about indigenous scenes in Canada, India and lots of places in between. In other words, they were talking about heavy metal.

The Norwegians were Ivar Bjornson and Grutle Kjellson, who founded their metal band, Enslaved, 16 years ago. They were once identified with the spooky — and, for a time, hugely controversial — subgenre known as black metal, but they have sloughed off one label after another while slowly building a worldwide following.

Not a huge one: They are rock stars, more or less, in Norway, but they are decidedly underground figures in most of the rest of the world. Still, that a hundred or so fans came out to see them at the Crocodile Rock Café, a cavernous Allentown club, says something about the tenacity of the genre and the band. The members hurtled through a typically eerie, riveting set, propelled by tricky rhythms, keyboard atmospherics, mutating guitar riffs and careful but cathartic explosions of noise and screaming.

This was the fourth date of a grueling five-week tour, and the unglamorous surroundings only underscored the mixed blessing of being in a band like this one. Being a working metal band often means touring the world indefinitely.

On a chilly night at the Crocodile Rock, that might not have seemed like good news to the band members. But it should be good news to adventurous listeners around the country, including those in New York: Thursday night the band is scheduled to play the B. B. King Blues Club & Grill. And you don’t have to be an expert in Scandinavian history — or even a metal fan, really — to enjoy getting lost in the group’s epic, elegant music.

Enslaved went from being called “black metal” to being called “Viking metal” to being called “progressive metal,” though the members prefer the catch-all term “extreme metal.” And in an Internet age especially, extreme metal both transcends national boundaries and, in a fertile way, emphasizes them. “Evil” imagery exists everywhere, inspiring scenes all over the globe. And as old-fashioned Satanic imagery has given way to subtler allusions to pre-Christian culture, obsessive fans have gotten used to doing online homework to keep up with the lyric sheets. If you like Enslaved, for example, you probably know that Mr. Kjellson used to sing in Icelandic because of that language’s similarity to Old Norse, and you may even know something about ancient runes.

Now Mr. Kjellson mainly sings in English, partly in an attempt to close the language gap with non-Norwegian fans, many of whom had been following the band’s evolving interests by reading the English translations included in some albums. Mr. Bjornson said the foreignness of English was a benefit too: “That dissonance helps, getting into character, removing ourselves from our daily lives.”

On the most recent Enslaved album — a great CD from 2006 called “Ruun” (Candlelight USA) — the English-language lyrics are more suggestive than bombastic. Hints of the old black-metal misanthropy remain (“I do not pity life/I follow not pathetic order”), but the mood is more melancholy than pugnacious. The title track, one of the highlights of Tuesday’s show, is a crashing paean to the old gods, building from a prog-rock introduction to a seething climax: “Reach for them, see them turn away.”

From listening to the latest CD, you might never guess that Enslaved was once associated with one of the most reviled music scenes of all time. In the early 1990s Norwegian black metal made headlines with a series of high-profile events: one musician’s suicide, a spate of church burnings and the conviction of two prominent figures — Faust of Emperor and Varg Vikernes of Burzum — for murder.

One of Enslaved’s first releases was a split album with Emperor, and Mr. Bjornson admits that the media storm helped draw attention to Norwegian black metal. “People still regard Norway with a certain respect,” he said. “Not only because of all the scary stuff that happened — well, ‘weird’ is a better word — but because of how the scene developed, on its own.” Then, having benefited from the controversy, many bands associated with black metal had to figure out a way to live it down.

Enslaved did it by persevering and by changing: The members view “Monumension,” an excellent and mysterious-sounding album from 2001, as the beginning of a new phase. And in Norway the members of Enslaved are settling into their unlikely roles as respected veterans. Oddly enough, the Norwegian Ministry of Culture and Church Affairs sponsored a collaboration between members of Enslaved and the noisy electronic duo Fe-mail. The hybrid group is called Trinacria (you can hear live tracks at myspace.com/trinacriamusic), and a full-length album is due next year. Extreme metal, which once seemed like a threat to Norway’s cultural heritage, is inevitably coming to be seen as part of it. How long before the government finances an ad campaign, inviting black-metal fans from around the world to come to the most evil country on Earth?

Certainly some sort of cultural exchange program seemed to be under way at the Crocodile Rock on Tuesday, where Mr. Kjellson kept saying, “You having a good time, Allentown?” Or, “Thank you, Allentown, Pennsylvania.” Or, “This is the last song for tonight, Allentown.”

Before long, the city name was starting to sound like a curse word, or maybe just a reminder that the life of a touring extreme-metal band is hard work. But Mr. Kjellson surely knows that the genre’s popularity in a handful of European countries is the exception, not the rule. Around the world metal endures — and, in its own subterranean way, flourishes — in nooks and crannies.

It was now early on Wednesday morning in empty downtown Allentown, and the small crowd in the big club remained. As the band prepared to play the savage title track from “Isa,” Mr. Kjellson said, “I guess most of you already know this one.” And he guessed right.

Enslaved will perform tonight at the B. B. King Blues Club & Grill, 237 West 42nd Street, Manhattan, (212) 997-4144; bbkingblues.com.