Show Report: Antichrist Vanguard Tour
March 22 2008 at 12:00:00 AM It is ludicrously easy to acquire large quantities of pig’s blood in Atlanta. I had my pick of several different markets and several different preparations. There were gallon buckets and frozen, air-vacuumed packages. There were plastic containers of coagulated, gelatinous cakes of bright, deep red blood. I opted for the latter and enjoyed a chicharrone while I wheeled the six blood-filled containers around the market, peeping into cages of croaking bullfrogs, watching fishmongers wrestle catfish and eels and crab to massive plastic cutting boards pocked with viscera and brown gore. The clerk didn’t pause when I loaded the blood onto the conveyor; the customers behind me—Hispanic men with bushy black mustaches and white straw Stetsons had carts full of pig heads, maws and feet, cases of Corona piled below. ANTICHRIST VANGUARDS TOUR; 5.18 ATLANTA For a week I opened my fridge, grabbing a beer, eggs, bread, bottled water. The blood was there in the bottom, above the crisper, above the carrots and the celery, turning darker every day. Every time I opened the fridge, I thought about Watain and the show that seemed to never arrive. Friday night and the club’s doors are locked—one hour after they were supposed to be open. Huddles of heads pass smokes and guzzle beers. Cars root around the lot looking for parking. Laughing bones emerge, one after the other. I talk to some guy who’s made it down from North Carolina for the show; after a few minutes he points at the plastic gallon jug in my hand. “You must be the blood guy,” he laughs. It is also ludicrously easy to “smuggle” in alcohol to Atlanta clubs. All manner of vessel and elixir will attest. My Wild Turkey proved the tonic for anxiety and even made a gentlemanly trade later in the evening. The booze was well needed throughout Gravewurm’s set, which was unbearably pathetic. A few heads nodded up front, but I would like to think that it was in anticipation of Nachtmystium, which completely unleashed and left me speechless. Blake is a big fucking guy and the band he had assembled little resembled any notion I had of them; they didn’t match the DVD I own, nor various photos that I had wrangled from Internet message boards. Tight, focused, and potent, every single song was delivered with assured conviction and hatred. The heads were rolling; the fists were pumping and I was doing my best to take the worst photos of my life. Several beers and shots later, Florida’s Negative Plane hit the stage. Hooded robes, some decorated with bones. Both bass player and guitarist/vocalist are wearing snakeskin cowboy boots. Smoke chokes the stage and ghosts from the floor. Candles are lit. Someone drops a beer in front of me and it splashes all over the front of my pants. When they start, there’s something a bit off; by the second piece the soundman has cocooned the vocals in echo—a sort of drifting No2 freakout crashing through ears and pounding the brain. Even without the organ or bells or other effects, Negative Plane kills it, matching Nachtmystium’s power and lending a much welcomed feeling of ritual to the space. There’s a lot of drinking going on. Standing in line for another beer, I hear bottles hit the trashcan, some hit the floor, others clink in toast. Everything’s getting a little rubbery around the edges and I’m starting to feel like the bartender’s cocking an eye at me every time I slur another drink order. Thick tips keep him from cutting me short and seconds later I find myself in line for the shitter talking to some dwarfin Latino head with a Morbid Angel shirt on. We trade shots; his comes from a crumpled plastic Coke bottle. It’s fucking Guaro, and I realize this after I notice the entire right side of my body going numb. He appears to like the Wild Turkey as he’s hissing like a lobster above a rolling boil and laughing maniacally. By the time I get into the restroom I’m not so sure I’m psychically prepared for it: someone has literally smeared shit all over the toilet; there's about two inches of piss and shit and toilet paper on the floor and I have to hold my hand over my mouth to keep from vomiting. Once my business is done, I warn the leather-clad sprite next in line: "It smells like death," I tell him. "So do I," he quips. Then I realize it is Erik Danielsson. Onstage, Watain is ashen faced; arms and hands and heads splattered with blood, clothes hanging from their bones in various states of decomposition. Up close their smell is a churning mixture of life and death, putrefaction and perspiration, which couples in a stagnant perfume redolent of rotting fish. There are bones adorning microphone stands; there are blood red candles hotly lit and tearing wax; there are skinned lambs’ heads in a vile puddle around Danielsson’s mic. This must have been how it was to see Mayhem—the old and “true” Mayhem; it must have been how it was to see Mortuary Drape in their heyday: a stage of macabre accoutrements, all assembled to harness some sort of innate and darkened power. Watain knows this. The band has built its strength up from Metal’s mythos and has effectively subverted traditional Catholic iconography to a blackened and heretical end. This is an inherently religious music and the in vivo dissemination of it is nothing but ritual. Everything was working for Watain that mid-May evening in Atlanta. Erik exhorted the crowd. The crowd responded. Songs were sung with several mouths. Words were lingered on and tightly held; verbal charms whispered and shrieked prayers to pestilence. Watain invoked the old and the new, making Dissection’s “The Somberlain” its own, honoring Nödtveidt and setting a hard and fast standard for future hordes. “Through raging fire, death and hail; clinging to the dragon’s tail. And as the world behind me burns, I ride its wings on paths of No Return.” [Stewart Voegtlin] ANTICHRIST VANGUARDS TOUR; 5.14 NEW YORK The sixth stop of the heralded Antichrist Vanguard tour May 14th at New York's BB Kings Blues Club and Grill, featured an overwhelming (and from other reports impressively consistent) performance by Sweden's Watain, setting foot on US soil for the first time. Nevertheless, the trip proved to be, for some, a low point in the adventure. Faced with an audience concerned more with socializing, club-housing, and static viewing (I guess what happens when you collectively fail to produce more than a handful of bands of any merit in the last decade), a ruthless club policy that rakes in 30% of merchandise sales, exacts (and enforces) the ludicrous charge of $10 for a table seat and serves drinks beginning $8 and up, as well as the looming constraints of the city’s renowned sanctity of sanitation, the prospect for the complete Watain experience seemed from onset doubtful. The evening redness to be became a matter of stage light, not plasma. But at a venue which every Sunday hosts their own Gospel brunch, the sight of burning candles, sheep heads (eyes intact), inverted crosses, and bowie knives stabbed into amplifiers—of Satan and spinal remains—not only transformed but fortunately blurred the lines between the sacred and profane. The show finally kicked off at 11pm with a strong performance from local howlers Dimentianon, whose apparently haunted and deranged singer, along with their guitarist—owner of said bowie knife—did everything possible to rile the modest crowd. Cheers and early bruises surfaced amid the stage diving, ending with a fine show of the group's forceful and ever-tightening sound. They were abruptly followed by not-black metallers Nachtmystium, who seem destined for greater success outside the boundaries they now humbly walk away from. Whatever one feels about their career up to this point, they built an impressively energetic, serious and nearly unbroken performance dominated by songs off their pivotal Instinct: Decay album and with a record-setting exit had, more than either act directly preceding or following them, made the night their own. Not long after, the newly reformed Angelcorpse arrived, bringing with them high expectations and a surly disposition. In the interim between the group's split and subsequent rejoining their music appeared safely not forgotten. Nor were certain points of controversy. Earlier this year, Oaken Throne magazine virtuously refused a suggestion by this writer to contact the band, reasoning that frontman Pete Helmkamp, having once published a slapdash philosophical / occult pamphlet entitled The Conqueror Manifesto, influenced by the likes of Crowley, Nietzsche, and Ragnar Redbeard's “might is right" doctrine, had thus qualified for full "Nazi" status. The trio (minus long-time second guitarist Bill Taylor, currently with Immolation) carried on steadily but was unable to shake the hole in sound and weakness of the soundboard. Given the on-record power of their cyclonic catalog, their performance on this night registered as a disappointment. Favorites "Wolflust," "Phallelujah," and "Into the Storm of Steel" anchored the lengthy set while new songs "Machinery of the Cleansing" and "Hexensabbat," from their fourth album Of Lucifer and Lightning, were welcomed politely. The new album, as surprising as it was to hear, incorporates much of the marsh drudging tone of later Morbid Angel. Itself not terrible, but hardly an argument against Helmkamp's own remarks once given regarding the infamous Three Album Jinx: "You know... three great ones, and then only crap..." And then it was time. Battling elbows and whipping hand gestures as I was set upon by a small army of possessed and loudly entranced Latinos, Watain finally took the stage, clad in leather and shredded cloth, caked in powder mixed with blood. Up close their makeup appears less like the standard “war paint” and more like affliction, disease—persuading through presentation that seems thoroughly ingrained with their character as emissaries of some lost and graven order; they look like they've been wearing it forever. The reception was collectively thrown into the barrage of "Underneath the Cenotaph," "Devil's Blood," and "Satan's Hunger," during which the not uncommon splatter of hops was made a pale substitute for the more frightening douse of stale blood and entrails. With each wet spray I stood glaring down at my hand, looking for a sign of deep color. But there was no reeking ooze, only back metal. Complaints against their latest, Sworn to the Dark and its new accessibility were largely negated. The album feels intended for a live setting (no less an art that the genre should maintain here in the States) affirming its more traditional riffing and strong choruses. As for mellowing or mailed-in influences, despite frequent (and accurate) comparisons, one would be hard pressed to find something there as syrupy as the bulk of Dissection's largely overrated backlog. Appropriately enough, however, the set was bridged by a hugely surprising cover of "The Somberlain," one of the few early Dissection tracks written front to back by the late offering, Jon Nodviedt and perhaps the best testament to his stormy legacy. There was an oddly delayed second for everyone to catch on and then the screams would not relent for any somber melody. That was the immediate audience anyway. I suppose those statues in the back had their fill as well. Fine for them, but only cunts would clap for Watain. The sentiment, while not definitely confirmed, had by night’s end at least some echo of truth in vocalist Erik Danielsson's parting words to The Big Apple: Fuck you all. [Todd DePalma] |
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