Bonecrusher Tour with Black Dahlia Murder @ Birmingham Academy 2, 4th February 2010

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With a mammoth seven-band bill meaning an opening time of 5PM, you’d have been forgiven for assuming the only people populating the Academy at such an hour would be a motley rabble of schoolkids and bums. So arriving just in time to catch opening act Ingested take to the stage, I was taken aback to find that I’d be forced to take the de rigueur position for over-thirties (a group of which I’m not officially part of, but the average age of the audience dictated that I was part of the ‘elderly’ ten percent of the crowd) at the back of the venue, through necessity rather than choice given the surprising amount of people eagerly crammed into the front half.

Manchester’s Ingested were afforded a rare luxury, an opening slot with a really crushing sound, breathtaking in its immediacy. Obnoxiously parading a repulsively heavy take on what many refer to as SLAM DEATH (I’m seemingly only able to use capitals when I refer to it), a sub-genre I’ve only recently been turned onto. The style, and as such the band, commonly displays a down-tuned sound that crudely welds equal parts old-school death metal influence — most notably Suffocation — with a strong acknowledgement to classic metalcore, especially the mosh parts. Especially the mosh parts. Vocals are guttural, close to the point of self-parody and are occasionally referred to, most usually by myself, as ‘breeee’ vocals. Being crammed together onstage due to two, maybe three backlines behind them meant that whilst their stage presence was slightly restricted, the preposterous breakdowns — or slams — meant that no one was unable to stop nodding along like a mongrel cross-breed of Snoop Dogg and Churchill Dog. It also seemed like there was a drum trigger or guitar effect at work during their slams as they would kick in with such subsonic force that you’d need to tune your guitar to the actual Richter Scale to get close to the same effect. Ultimately, Ingested will live and die by the conventions of their chosen path, and this particular offshoot of death metal can get rather formulaic — one of my friends actually complained that the band were too samey — but having witnessed two more straight-ahead, pummelling DM bands in Decapitated and Kataklysm a few nights previously, I was more than happy to enjoy a set of groovy, primal, well, SLAM DEATH.

Not realising that the opening handful of acts on this inaugural Bonecrusher Fest operated on a rotating basis, California’s The Faceless were next up and having checked out their back catalogue a few weeks prior, I was really looking forward to these, perhaps most of all. The main reason for this is the simple fact that The Faceless are ridiculous. In no way a slight on the band, merely the only word I can come up when attempting to describe them. Their material is a dizzying, futuristic take on technical death metal, with hardcore and progressive elements running throughout. Mainly featuring material from their latest full-length, ‘Planetary Duality’, the jaw-dropping technicality and labyrinthine playing displayed on that album replicated almost perfectly onstage, with ‘The Ancient Covenant’ one of the highlights of both show and album. Containing enough ideas and virtuosity in this one song to fuel many a lesser bands entire stagetime, its breakdowns alone ferocious enough — mainly down to drummer Lyle Cooper’s feet running at ludicrous speed — to send many a pretender running away in tears. That’s not to mention the Vai-esque guitar runs or the vocoder sections knotted within the scramble-net complexity of their compositions. This mind-boggling calculus can be applied to the remainder of their set also, although the different songs contained enough individual flourishes to provide them with a strong identity. Take the black metal passage and the moody solo in ‘XenoChrist’ for example, and the fact that by the end of the song there’s probably no note left unplayed on the guitar by either axeman.
Wrapping up an all-too-brief set with an airing of ‘An Autopsy’, from their 2006 debut ‘Akeldama’, a quick nod at their past, but via both subject matter and musicianship The Faceless are all about the future, and whilst this strain of ultra-tech death metal will never reach a mass audience, they’ll continue to draw fans in through the sheer ridiculousness of it all.

Picking up the gauntlet of ultra-tech death metal left onstage by The Faceless were Relapse Records’ Obscura ,who stopped the whole thing descending into some kind of ultra-tech death metal willy-waving contest by not actually sounding much like The Faceless at all, despite the fact that they share a ton of common ground with them. Whereas The Faceless sounded at times like a band attempting to cram as many riffs into as short a space of time as possible, Obscura allowed their songs to breathe and the strength of their songwriting was exemplified by their ability to craft arresting songs despite their myriad working components. Relying less on the power of the chug than some of their contemporaries, instead they put more of a classical bent on things, with emphasis on considered maturity over youthful exuberance. Occasional clean passages and the introduction of almost sitar-sounding effects corroborate such theories, with barely a lick of hardcore influence to be heard. A cover of Death’s ‘Lack of Comprehension’ slips in almost unnoticed amongst their own material, which is lofty praise for a band ploughing such a similar furrow to Chuck Schuldiner’s masters of the genre. Although taking their name from Gorguts’ 1998 landmark DM opus, Obscura need to be careful as its one thing to name your sources, but another to creep into the realms of fanboyism. It mattered little as the rousing sendoff they received instantly dispelled the myth that ‘scene kids don’t know metal’.

For those few who did harbour a desire to see a little less finesse and a few more mosh parts had their appetites sated by the arrival of Carnifex. Hailing from San Diego, they have amassed a respectable following given their dogged road schedule over the past few years, and a quick T-shirt count suggests that they’re one of the most anticipated bands here today for a lot of people. Old hands at this game now, Carnifex prove they can command a stage effortlessly, throwing out bomb after bomb of tightly coiled, crowd-pleasing deathcore, extremely heavy yet with a surprisingly melodic undercurrent due mostly to the tendrils of Swedish death metal frequently entwining itself throughout the riffing. It got quite monotonous quite quickly for me, although the crowd remained enraptured, with seemingly the whole venue screaming along to the “What the fuck?” sample that punctuates ‘Lie to My Face’. With a new album, ‘Hell Chose Me’ imminent and with the promotional weight of Victory Records behind it, it’ll be interesting to see if they can use this groundswell of support and reach the level of the likes of their peers in Job For A Cowboy and All Shall Perish.

If there was to be a square peg in a round hole on this tour, Sweden’s Necrophobic would probably be it. Their brand of death metal is one blackened beyond recognition, with the five-piece taking to the stage bedecked in full corpse paint and similarly matching shirts, leathers and spikes, like a grim and frostbitten gang from ‘The Warriors’.

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Having been twenty years since the release of their first cassette demo, Necrophobic take the role of the hoary old veterans of the tour, and despite their aesthetic differences with the rest of the bill, they manage to fit in well enough. Introducing a stylistic shift into the dominion of the old-school, with hints of Possessed, Dismember and as befits their name — the thrashing stabs of early Slayer. Again, a lack of variation meant that my mind wandered now and again, but in fairness to the band they attempted to keep things interesting, at one point waving a huge golden flag emblazoned with the Necrophobic logo. There was no real need for the vocalist to conduct his stage raps in such a cartoonishly evil voice though, as nine times out of ten you’ll sound about as evil as a bag of Quavers.

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The shedding of the more contemporary-sounding elements of tonight’s bill that began with Necrophobic continued with the main support for the tour, Canadians 3 Inches of Blood. Having leapt into the consciousness of many around the time of 2004’s ‘Advance and Vanquish’, 3IOB have been regular visitors to these shores in the past, most notably with a clutch of hardcore and metalcore acts. It’s an association I’ve always found baffling as for the most part the band have always played more traditionally-influenced metal, with vocalist Jamie Hooper, who provided the harsh vocals the only real meeting point between the two disparate styles. Nowadays, with Hooper no longer a member of the band due to a long-term throat issue, 3IOB are on the verge of fulfilling their metamorphosis into a cross-cultural hybrid — albeit one that would give Stan Boardman a heart attack — of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and Germanic proto-Power Metal such as the Scorpions et al.

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Aided in no small part by the soaring lead vocals of Cam Pipes, songs such as ‘Call of the Hammer’ (“About Thor’s hammer smashing Jesus Christ in the face”, apparently) and ‘Sword Master’ seem to be intent on re-appropriating Accept for the beatdown generation, and it would have caused no eyebrows to be raised had they broken into a cover of ‘Fast as a Shark’ all of a sudden. I wasn’t sure that the band went down that well with the section of the crowd weaned on the likes of the headliners, as they skirted the line between teutonic riff homage and post-modern ironicism a little too finely at times. They still managed to rouse a decent enough response to justify their position on the bill, but hopefully having less and less of a connection to hardcore nowadays will see them on a few more lineups more suited to their style.

It was an arduous, ear-mangling journey at points, but once The Black Dahlia Murder kicked off things got really serious, with cheers consisting of both relief that the wait was over for some, and a sheer unbridled pre-pit war cry for others. The Black Dahlia Murder’s signature meshing of technical guitar histrionics to almost relentless high-speed blasting bears little resemblance to the deathcore tag they are always labelled with, certainly there is a distinct lack of core to their death, with the lupine howl of vocalist and enemy of spell-checkers everywhere Trevor Strnad free of any tuff guy inflection. Sure, there are the occasional moshable sections dotted around, but the odd half-speed riff here and there does not a hardcore band make, and besides which, it never did Bolt Thrower any harm.
After such a full-on relentless assault of death metal, it became hard on occasion to pick out relative high points, or indeed song titles, but a post-gig BDM refresher indicated that the set was weighted in favour of their latest platter ‘Deflorate’, itself the bands most finely-honed recording to date. The band were ridiculously tight however, and a consistently high-energy performance ensured it was hard to divert your attention away from the stage.

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Often derided for the dress sense of their fans rather than for any kind of musical shortcoming, for me personally the Black Dahlia Murder have an importance that cannot be underestimated. As a band that has gathered so many fans, they also have the responsibility of acting as a gateway band for a lot of kids, for whom many will take their appreciation of BDM and start checking out their influences and gaining a respect for the genre as a whole, thus giving us a whole new generation of extreme metal fans right there.
Maybe my view is a tad rose-tinted and optimistic, but I come from a day where the only bands featured in the rock press in my youth were the likes of Terrorvision and Green Day, with virtually no column inches devoted to anything of the extreme variety. We should be grateful that bands like the Black Dahlia are putting extreme music out there into the wider consciousness, and onto thousands of tees worldwide.

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Granted, these so-called ‘scene kids’ may seem worlds apart from the traditional death metaller, what with their oversized baseball caps and luminescent vomit-inducing band tees; but all respect in the world to them for coming to a show with seven bands, and showing their appreciation in varying degrees throughout the night. Maybe the kids are alright after all.

Review Duncan Wilkins
Photos Steve Gerrard

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