Let’s start with the legends.
Cannibal Corpse, the top-selling death metal act of all time, headlined. Mayhem — a first-wave Norwegian black metal act whose sordid history includes church burnings and, ahem, literal murder — was next down the bill, and the sinister pair was preceded by dissonance pioneers Gorguts, whose blurry style proved highly influential on the technical death metal genre.
The show started four minutes early, at 6:26 p.m., perhaps a sign of the efficiency of the crew running this top-notch tour.
First on the chopping block, though — and here’s where the newer, forward-thinking bit comes in — were current critical darlings Blood Incantation, whose mix of death metal, prog and psychedelia has racked up copious praise from outside the genre, even including indie bible Pitchfork.
Blood Incantation’s set included “Awakening From the Dream of Existence to the Multidimensional Nature of Our Reality (Mirror of the Soul).” That marathon and the fact that the quartet’s harmonically dense 30-minute set included only three songs should provide a clue to its approach. These guys take the prog seriously.
Pre-recorded synths bubbled up between songs, providing a reminder that Blood Incantation also takes creating a vibe seriously.
During its short set, Blood Incantation distinguished itself as an extreme metal act to watch, and for a certain type of attendee last night, it was the easy highlight.
Surprisingly, Gorguts — fronted by silver-haired, big-bearded scene elder Luc Lemay — stuck to early material for its performance. Five of the seven songs came from the band’s 1991 debut, Considered Dead, and its post-’90s material, despite making massive waves in the scene, was notably absent.
Blood Incantation may have looked to the sky, but Gorguts looked to the Earth. Its material felt so heavy and intense it was at risk of continental drift.
Even that early in the evening, the general admission area in front of the stage surged with activity. The moshing, writhing crowd became a seething organism as the night progressed. The lack of circle pits was surprising, but the slamming melee and crowd surfing made up for that. It may have been that the sold-out Aztec was simply too packed to accommodate circular motion.
If anyone was disappointed by Gorguts’ lack of recent material, they didn’t show it. Lemay even shouted it out to the crowd, “We’re keeping it old school for you!” The set served as a history of the band and illuminated the roots of its more complex later sound.
The era covered in Gorguts’ set certainly fit the theme of the evening, since the three bands at the top of the bill came to prominence in the early ’90s.
Mayhem emerged from that decade as perhaps the most infamous band in extreme metal. The group’s macabre early years inspired anything from a movie to books to documentaries to prison sentences — and original frontman Dead invented corpse paint, the ghoulish black and white makeup donned by so many subsequent black metal performers.
Some audience members sported the look Tuesday night, though the show’s proximity to Halloween meant that it was offset by other less ominous costumes, such as one dude’s giant banana outfit.
Mayhem’s current incarnation includes only original bassist Necrobutcher from its early years. He was the last to take the stage for the band’s walkout, and the crowd reaction provided an unusual and triumphant moment for long-suffering and under-appreciated bassists everywhere.
The Norwegian group was the only one of the night that included any sort of theatrics, but it brought along enough for everyone. The set included costume and background changes, most notably the band donning monks’ robes at one point. Theatricality has been part of Mayhem’s schtick going all the way back, and it’s clearly left an influence on modern acts such as Ghost.
Mayhem closed its set with “Pure Fucking Armageddon,” which serves as both a great title and an apt descriptor of the band’s sound.
And then it was Cannibal Corpse time. The death metal titans gave a no-frills performance focused exclusively on death growls, intense riffery and headbanging. Lots of headbanging.
Despite the jaw-dropping riff skills of the band’s two guitar players, the focus for many fans remains vocalist George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher, he of the insanely thick neck and bottomless bellow. So notable is Fisher’s presence that he inspired the Nathan Explosion character on metal parody cartoon Metalocalypse.
During the set, the frontman jokingly challenged the enthusiastic crowd to a headbanging contest, announcing afterward, “Fifty-three fucking years old, and I won.” He may have been kidding on the surface, but the thing is, it’s true: no one bangs their head like Corpsegrinder.
But you can’t sleep on Cannibal Corpse bassist Alex Webster and drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz, the foundation of the band and one of the top metal rhythm sections this side of Iron Maiden’s.
The headliner destroyed the crowd over the course of a 70-minute set that included bangers such as “Evisceration Plague,” “Chaos Horrific” and “Pit of Zombies.” The group surprisingly began with a mid-tempo number, “Scourge of Iron,” concentrating on pure heaviness over speed.
Despite being known for playing fast, Cannibal Corpse relies on tempo changeups to maximize impact, sometimes incorporating several within the same song. This is the band’s real secret: there’s no fat. It slices riffs and arrangements bare so listeners are never able to catch their breath — and then Cannibal Corpse is off to their next thing.
By the time the band left stage, it was 11 p.m., less than five hours since the first synth notes of Blood Incantation’s intro track. Given the efficiency of the crew and the minimal downtime between bands, that was packing a lot of brutality into not much time.
As the crowd filed into the night, bruised but happy, no one could be heard complaining.
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