Live Report: Mortum, Hubris, Vrolok, Sathanas play NYC's Cake Shop

February 22, 2012

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On Saturday night, I was nearly stabbed by a nail-studded wrist guard. It wasn’t intentional. At first I thought the accidental offender wearing the wrist guard was just an enthusiastic fan. He had on some pretty grim corpse paint and was right up front in the headbanging section while New Jersey’s Mortum, the opener of the night’s four band set, played. It turned out he was a member of Hubris, the second opener of the night, from Buffalo, New York. He didn’t notice that he had nearly impaled me. I brushed it off. No puncture wound, no foul.

Mortum, Hubris, Vrolok, and Sathanas played the Cake Shop on NYC’s Lower East Side on February 11. It was the first show ever for Pennsylvania’s ambient black metal band Vrolok, and people were excited. Cake Shop is a bar on Ludlow Street, a street known for having a lot of bars and a good place to see some spectacular public intoxication. Cake Shop itself is the kind of place where plaid is the unofficial uniform, so it was a sight to see metalheads cycling in and out of the basement show space to smoke cigarettes and do whatever metalheads do throughout the night.

Down in the metal den, the three-piece Mortum took the stage around 9:30 and delivered a powerful opening set of hateful riff-heavy black metal. They have a few cassette releases that are worth checking out, in particular their recent full-length “The Rites of Depopulation”, and have been to NYC twice in the last month. The lead singer was the only frontman of the night to stand on the showroom floor, and he defiantly rasped his lyrics, head tilted back, toward the crowd of about 50. The ceiling above Cake Shop’s stage is covered in Christmas lights, and the juxtaposition of the lights and corpse paint was sort of dreamlike, of course more nightmarish than sweet. Vrolok and Sathanas turned them off for their sets.

Hubris started off their set by saying something about nuking NYC. I wanted to point out— kindly, of course— that some of us live here, but I think that was the point. They then tore into a rather long set of violent and chaotic black metal. They sounded pretty good, but without knowing anything about Hubris, it was a bit hard to really get a feel for the intricacies of what was going on. I liked that all three front men sang from time to time in a variety of shrieks and growls.

Hubris provided some moments of pure insanity. At one point in between songs, a 40-something year old woman in the crowd, who was dressed as if she had just come from a 4 Non Blondes concert, complete with mom jeans and a sort of beret, yelled out “WOOOO!! Buffalo, right?!” The lead singer looked a bit confused for a moment. He quickly recovered and rasped back something appropriately grim. At the end of the set, the same singer thanked us miserable humans for coming out and then commanded the crowd to, “Go buy all our shit! Go spend your hard earned money on my band! Hail Satan!”

Most of the crowd seemed to be at the show for Franklin, Pennsylvania’s Vrolok. Vrolok has been around since 2001 and has released five full-lengths and roughly 10 demos, but had never played live before. Though it was their first time taking the stage in public, it didn’t show. Vrolok doesn’t rely on speed and instead opts for measured chugging chord progressions and the occasional crushing, almost funereal, doom. Extended ambient passages bridged the gaps between most songs. The singer has an ominous stage presence, mostly standing still during instrumental sections. He also has a unique “UU-ah!” noise that he makes that was popular amongst the crowd. A select few were sporadically mimicking the noise well after the set was over. The band closed with a new epic dirge, “Disillusion Veil”. It was on a split cassette with Relique, a band that includes members of Vrolok, that was for sale at the show. I think the cassette is long gone. It was released by Fallen Empire and limited to 23 copies. It will be available on a pro press from Eighth Plague soon, though. For a first show, it was a great success.

The crowd had thinned by the time Sathanas, another Pennsylvania band, took the stage. It was after midnight, so it was excusable. Sathanas is old school. They’ve been around since 1988, playing a raw and thrashy brand of blackened death metal. It’s catchy and gives nods both to the thrash bands of yore while maintaining a forward-looking approach.

The show had progressed almost seamlessly from the youngsters, Mortum, who look like they’re in their late teens to mid-20s, to the gnarled veterans in Sathanas. It was all pretty underground, or kvlt, as some say. It was good to see it in action, a bunch of guys playing a dingy basement, fans buying up merch. The urban lumberjacks upstairs had no idea what was going on beneath their feet.

— Wyatt Marshall

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