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Immolation Concert Review
In the week before the Lucifer Over America tour came to Chicago, there was some confusion as to who was actually headlining the bill. One source said Belphegor, another said Rotting Christ, a third didn’t say either, and yet another mentioned only Immolation. While this was rather frustrating at the time, it proved to be an apt foreshadowing for the show itself. Although Rotting Christ were technically the headliners, the other two groups’ sets were just as successful (if shorter), and had the audience responding with equal fervor.
After originally being slated for The Pearl Room in Mokena, the tour instead came through the city proper at Logan Square Auditorium, which isn’t typically a venue I’m too thrilled to attend, given its amateur outfitting (i.e. light, sound, tech crew, acoustics—everything, essentially). Fortunately, though, the evening went very well on nearly all accounts. I suspect this is due to the presence of two stage crew members I recognized from their regular employment at Pearl Room, upon reflection, and can only hope that they moonlight more often.
Opening the night was a local support group Cardiac Arrest, followed by Texas’s Averse Sefira. Their names on the printed schedule at the door was as much as I saw of them, though; those first 90 minutes of the evening were spent in interview with Immolation. Well, 60 of those minutes—the other 30 were spent parking in the snow, getting nearly stuck in the snow, coordinating on the phone with the ever-patient Bob Vigna, jogging back to the car (in 19 degree weather) for interview questions, and finally returning to the tour bus to get things underway.
This was the first interview I’d done on a bus, and before we began I had a bit of an out of body experience. Here I was, sitting in the cushy back room, chatting with some of the godfathers of death metal, while in the room ahead of us, Helmuth of Belphegor sat doing wrist-curls with at least 40 pound dumbbells, and Bill Taylor (ex-Angelcorpse) was just pausing his video game, a platform side-scroller on Gamecube that looked as innocuous as Megaman or Kirby. Shaking it off, I sat down with the rest of the band and discussed their iconic brand of “dark art”, as Bob put it. The interview was a pleasant and informative one, but there still was a show to see—and perform, for them—so around 8:20 I packed my things and headed upstairs, where Averse Sefira had just wrapped up.
As I didn’t see them perform, I can’t speak to their ability, but opinion in the crowd seemed mixed and there were still enough empty spaces to slip through on the way to a spot at the front. Besides, most people were too focused on the band to come, Belphegor, to discuss openers, and I can’t blame them. Playing live as a quartet—with an unnamed session guitarist in for Sigurd—the Austrian group executed a set as cold and spiteful as anything they’ve put on record. With Sigurd gone, Helmuth was fully the leader and looked the part, streaked in black paint, clad in militant black, and wearing a weighty inverted Jesus pendant. Recalling his Schwarzeneggerian regimen from the bus and watching him lead the assault with his precise tremolo picking and harsh vocals, he seemed a perfect Teutonic war machine, marching straight to heaven with torch in hand.
After each song of their 40 minute set, a member of the crowd towards the front would utter an incredulous, “Fuck, yeah!”, while any number of other rabid devotees did their best to moan and groan their way into the band’s good graces. During brief respites, Helmuth would thrust up his arms and incite the audience to chanting while he surveyed us all with a half-sneer, half-smirk on his face.
The remainder of the band seemed to know that they couldn’t match Helmuth in terms of stage presence, so they focused on keeping up with him in performance, and in that respect they certainly succeeded. Torturer’s brief warm-up of tom fills and blastbeats served to remind us that although the other three members may not be central figures like Helmuth and Sigurd, they are all accomplished musicians, and the performances of each during the set proved as much.
Their setlist varied somewhat from their previous tour (less than a year ago, with Unleashed and Krisiun), but still drew most heavily from their newest material. I did not, regrettably, notice any appearances of new tracks from their forthcoming ‘Bondage Goat Zombie’. Some fans later complained that the sound wasn’t especially clear, and I do agree that Helmuth’s leads were hard to hear at times, but altogether the show they put on was still an impressive one.
However strong, few performances could have upstaged the act to come in Immolation. When I missed them on their last tour with Suffocation, I visualized an exaggerated account of what their set must have been like as self-punishment. It started small, but by the end had reached absurd proportions: Ross Dolan belching napalm between verses, Bob Vigna shifting tectonic plates with his guitar, Steve Shalaty causing audience members’ torsos to explode, and Bill Taylor bathing in their viscera. It was, in essence, a Dethklok episode brought to life, and with much better music.
Of course, no real band could live up to these expectations, but Immolation surprised me in coming much closer than I would have thought. Indeed, their set altogether ranks as one of the most forceful and complete embodiments of death metal that I have seen to date. I have seen younger bands play faster, louder, or with more technical wizardry, but few have been able to capture the essence of extremity, in all its forms, as well as Immolation, just as they have always done since the ‘Dawn of Possession’.
When their set began, the crowd unleashed all the energy that Belphegor had stirred up, with the moshpit raging and stage-divers coming in steady waves. It was so raucous that I nearly left the front for fear of my camera being shattered, but the rows behind me seemed even more violent than the single row ahead of me, and by the set’s midway point most of the moshers had exhausted themselves. The stage-diving, too, seemed too have taken a toll on them, particularly the dreadlocked obese man who crashed to the floor not once, but twice, when the audience shied away from his drunken leaps.
After the rather mild interview earlier in the evening, it was startling to see the band kick into such high gear, Ross and Bob in particular. With his guitar anchored at his hip, Bob still managed to chop with his guitar and swing it about quite forcefully, while Ross stomped his booted feet and delivered his lyrics with features contorted in agony. Although all were clad in monochrome black, Bill was the one looking most sinister with his tattoos, high-buckling combat boots, and perpetual sneer. Steve was a lesser physical presence, being behind the drum kit, and his baseball cap made it even more difficult to focus on him as he played. Luckily, his performance was such that no one forgot about him, and during the off-beat cymbal pattern in ‘Son of Iniquity’ the crowd was cheering specifically for him.
Since they had toured so recently, their setlist didn’t include as many major songs as I had expected—and the crowd got on them a bit for this. However, Ross mentioned between songs (when not graciously recognizing the other bands on tour and the audience for attending) that they were trying to mix things up a bit, and for that I give them credit. From the latest album they played only ‘World Agony’ and ‘Passion Kill’, and then spent the majority of their 50 minutes on material from ‘Close to a World Below’ and the two albums following. Altogether, the band’s trademark brutal lurch and Bob’s atonal soloing all translated superbly to the live setting, and though we were all quite spent by the time their set finished, we still were disappointed to see them leave the stage.
After a final short layover, we were treated at last to the headlining group of the night: Rotting Christ, halfway through their first trek across U.S. soil. When this tour was announced, their name was a surprise to see, especially as a headliner, since I wouldn’t expected their brand of catchy, blackened metal to cause much of a stir in this country. Rather, I projected them to be more of a footnote to the surefire successes of Belphegor and Immolation.
Quite to the contrary, they turned out a crowd-pleasing set that rivaled both their predecessors for energy and flair. Formed by the brothers Sakis and Themis Tolis in the late 80’s, Rotting Christ has become a bellwether for Greek metal, even as the band has morphed from its early black metal roots to a more streamlined, sophisticated style that is as singular as it is widely appealing. Maintaining some of black metal’s songwriting techniques and riffing patterns, the band now implement more backing keyboards (piped in for the set) and anthemic choruses that made their live set an exhilarating experience. The songwriting is generally simple, but the band has a knack for atmosphere and timing that makes even their most straightforward material engaging. The guitars were especially present in their set, too, which was crucial. On lead guitar, George had an effects board at his feet that he used to give his Razorback the fitting twang, crunch, or piercing clarity for each song in their set. Although Sakis’s guitar was occasionally too quiet, the visual impact of the ‘NON SERVIAM’ pearl inlay on his fretboard was enough to make up the difference.
Aside from his strong performance ability, Sakis also proved to be a charismatic front-man. With the Greek lettering for ‘666’ emblazoned on his T-shirt, he marched across the stage, stabbing at the audience with his guitar, thumping his chest, and roaring at the front rows even when away from the microphone. On either side, Andreas on bass and George on guitar were more grounded, but still headbanged and windmilled with righteous rock fury, with Themis pounding away on his snare and bass drums. Although their set included a number of recent singles—‘Enuma Elish’, ‘Athanatoi Este’, ‘Nemecic’, etc.—they also ranged back to some classic older tracks, including the fan favorite ‘Non Serviam’ as an encore. Despite having relatively few lyrics in English, many in the audience were singing (or growling, more appropriately) to the choruses and pumping their horns in time. Some others who had never heard of the band before were tapping their feet before long, while a couple leapt headlong into the fray towards the front of the stage.
And as their finally set drew to an end with us all chanting, “In nomine Satani, in domine Satani!”, the name of the tour finally made some sense, beyond anti-establishment marketing ploys. While I doubt any members in the crowd were converted to Satan’s cause that night, with Belphegor, Immolation, and Rotting Christ making the rounds as his envoys, Lucifer Over America really doesn’t seem like such a bad thing after all.
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