Meshuggah and High on Fire Live at LA's The Novo
Words by Jason Roche
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Meshuggah’s U.S. tour with openers High On Fire delivered few surprises when it rolled through The Novo in Los Angeles on October 19. The question of how many songs Meshuggah would play from their latest record, The Violent Sleep of Reason – released earlier this month – was the only source of suspense for concertgoers heading into the show.
The 8pm start time allowed fans of both bands plenty of time to fight Los Angeles rush hour traffic. High on Fire played to an at least half-capacity crowd by the time they took the stage. Meshuggah fans expelled energy via the moshpit in a carefree manner, knowing that with the headliner being off the stage by 11PM, they had a fighting chance at a reasonable night’s sleep before work the next morning.
High on Fire’s musical racket sounded monstrous in the larger 2,300-capacity concert hall. Matt Pike’s throaty rasp sounded rough and world-weary with age. The hour-long set focused on material from more recent High On Fire albums. Those looking to jam out to favorites from albums such as 2005’s Blessed Black Wings were out of luck.
With High on fire, Meshuggah continued their pattern of selecting openers that differ from themselves stylistically, much like Tool did with them during the Nothing era. Baroness opened for them on the U.S. tour supporting Koloss. One could see a visible divide between fans of both bands – typically shaggy-haired dudes with facial hair – and those who just killed time and nursed their drinks until Meshuggah took the stage. As a result, High on Fire played to a lower-energy audience than at most of their headlining shows.
Meshuggah fans that conserved their energy during High on Fire’s set erupted when the headliner took the stage. Meshuggah has avoided oversaturating themselves in the American market. Since they typically only tour the U.S. once per album, Meshuggah concerts remain heavily anticipated events. If you wanted to get a closer view and not get barreled over by a tornado of moshers, the approximately 75%-filled room was a tough spot to find room for a safe space. When security capped the number of people allowed access to the proper pit area in front of the stage, Meshuggah fans took it upon themselves to create their own pits on the next level up from the main floor.
Meshuggah delivered their sonic force in the live setting with the same amount of ruthless precision as their recorded output. An intense moving strobe-light show and creepy backlit scrims featuring artwork from the new album accompanied the band. Vocalist Jens Kidman eschewed stage banter other than a quick “thank you and good night” at the end of the evening. The band provided plenty of energy live, but overall Meshuggah kept the focus of the show on the riffs and time changes they throw at their listeners.
Four songs out of the ninety-minute set came from The Violent Sleep of Reason. The rest of the set spanned their career with the exception of their 1991 debut Contradictions Collapse, which they usually ignore, and 2005’s Catch 33, which they had been showcasing more in recent years. Drumkit from hell or no, Meshuggah once again overpowered the imitators with an assault-weapon level firepower and sniper-like precision that is unique to their erratic din.
– Jason Roche
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High on Fire
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Meshuggah
We Miss Live Music: 250+ Metal Show Photos to Remind Us What It’s Like
[caption id="attachment_70787" align="aligncenter" width="630"]
Heilung 1.20.20 -- Photo: Andrew Rothmund[/caption]
I won't say much here, because I just want the photos to speak for themselves, but this context definitely can't hurt: there's no better way to experience a concert than from the photo pit with camera in hand. Free movement (mostly, usually), front-row seating, and the furious challenge of nailing just the right shots -- all these things coalesce into an ether that's thicker than oil and coats me warmly, every time. When I shoot shows, I am in the motherfucking zone, a space I can rarely access, a space I so dearly love, a space where I feel superhuman. I was never the most creative type, especially not visually, but photography has become a clear exception. I'm proud of myself for these shots, and I'm so impressed with each band presented below. They make the love of heavy metal an absolute flesh-and-blood reality, and for that I only have infinite thanks and appreciation. Let's hope we make it out of this -- in the meantime, crank up the tunes and imagine yourself there, right in front of the stage.
Support Invisible Oranges on Patreon and check out our merch.
Heilung 1.20.20 -- Photo: Andrew Rothmund[/caption]
I won't say much here, because I just want the photos to speak for themselves, but this context definitely can't hurt: there's no better way to experience a concert than from the photo pit with camera in hand. Free movement (mostly, usually), front-row seating, and the furious challenge of nailing just the right shots -- all these things coalesce into an ether that's thicker than oil and coats me warmly, every time. When I shoot shows, I am in the motherfucking zone, a space I can rarely access, a space I so dearly love, a space where I feel superhuman. I was never the most creative type, especially not visually, but photography has become a clear exception. I'm proud of myself for these shots, and I'm so impressed with each band presented below. They make the love of heavy metal an absolute flesh-and-blood reality, and for that I only have infinite thanks and appreciation. Let's hope we make it out of this -- in the meantime, crank up the tunes and imagine yourself there, right in front of the stage.
Bell Witch
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Gigan
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Warforged
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Sleep
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Lamb of God
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Heilung
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Haunter
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Cattle Decapitation
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Uncouth
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The Razor-Sharp Rapture of Svederna’s “Skuld Och Vita Knogar” (Track Premiere)
Wasting no time and leading in with a throat-ripping scream, "Skuld Och Vita Knogar" makes the appeal of Sweden's Svederna immediately clear: wintry black metal with ancient tradition embedded into its rough-hewn core. On their upcoming album Härd, the band captures the stark tones and impact of early black metal, refocusing that rawness into a vehicle for weaving moments of snowblind wonder into their undeniable form of black metal. Stream "Skuld Och Vita Knogar" now and get a taste for the combination:
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The song's dramatic tremolo-picked melodies create a sense of near-bursting denseness, so much that any interruption feels like a too-sudden depressurization. As you're reeling from the musical equivalent of the bends, Svederna uses these moments to define new melodies in crystal clarity before dropping you back into the depths and resuming the blast beat therapy. Cast in exceedingly sharp tones and vividly rendered, "Skuld Och Vita Knogar" is a reminder of how hard black metal can hit without sacrificing expressiveness....
Härd releases August 28th via Carnal Records.Support Invisible Oranges on Patreon and check out our merch.
Khaima’s Artful Heaviness is an “Extrapolation” of Prog Metal (Video Premiere)
Prog metal generally slots into two categories for me: on one hand, some bands seem to design their music for maximum mind-melting, planning out each tempo change and key shift with the aim of pushing the envelope and destroying fans' hopes of tabbing out the guitar bits. In other cases, such as with Germany's Khaima, the progressive leanings don't feel like a purposeful focus, just an outcome of the band's talent and their desire to communicate complex ideas. Coming from the upcoming album Owing To The Influence, their new single "Extrapolation" presents a brand of progressive metal that employs twisted, unconventional riffing and driving swells to overwhelm listeners through both precision and persuasion. We're premiering the video for it, which will take care of any needed brain destruction. Take a look (and listen) now:
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https://youtu.be/yR7K3VhkNRk...
The extra beats and unorthodox subdivisions that scaffold each part of "Extrapolation" create an odd cadence with a bouncy, unstoppable feel: a sense of inertia that carries each section into the next. This momentum is a collaborative effort between all members of the band, not just guitar-centric flashiness. While guitar dominates the heaviest passages with hypnotic spiral riffs, the rattling bass offers a tenuous handhold to withstand them. In the lulls, though, the exacting minimalism of the drumming is its own focal point -- subtle ghost notes and a stubborn avoidance of predictability requires constant alertness, waiting for the next snare drum hit to land. In the coda of the song, keyboards take on added significance, easing out of the shadows for a strong finish. As this all unfolds, the accompanying video intermixes bizarre imagery with the band performing the song, often overlaid -- it's pretty easy to let all the complexities of the song slip out of your mental grasp and just let yourself get lost in the perpetual motion, both aural and visual. While the heaviness and intricacy here can't be overlooked, there are strong conceptual ideas here, not just clever rhythms -- Khaima has noteworthy things to say, not just compelling ways to say them. Regarding "Extrapolation," the band notes:We count, simulate, histogram almost everything and relativize the results until the overall picture corresponds to our own imagination. Mainly for our own interests, we instrumentalize them in order to stand out and put ourselves in a better light, instead of confronting the core of the problem. The symptoms are pushed to the fore and the cause is ignored. Populism, conspiracy theories, fake news, alternative facts - our reality unfortunately depends too often on the point of view of the observer.
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"Owing to the Influence" releases October 30th via Barhill Records.Support Invisible Oranges on Patreon and check out our merch.
Symphonic Death Grooves: Foretoken’s “His Rage Made Manifest” (Song Premiere)
Raw beauty finds itself in symphony; raw power finds itself in melody. By that logic, Virginia duo Foretoken should have megazord levels of might and oodles of style to boot. It turns out, they do. The band's debut release Ruin captures the essence of melodeath's yore without subscribing to any throwback casualties or lame attempts at sounding fresh through tried methods. Layering in swaths of symphonic elements and contracting the one and only Hannes Grossmann for drum duties, Foretoken have landed on a wicked formula of catchiness and edge-honing causticness that imbues their music with grit not often found in these smoother spaces. We're stoked to premiere Ruin's penultimate song "His Rage Made Manifest" below. Inside, you'll find rolling beats, plenty of groove and hooks to keep your mind in line, and the slightest blackened tinge for good measure. The album's other songs offer enough diversity to be distinct from this one, but still nestle into a sensible flow -- for a debut, this is one hell of a strong release, especially touching on subgenres often thought stale or otherwise worn out.
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https://youtu.be/QL7dkdb5adA...
Ruin releases September 4th, 2020 via Prosthetic Records. A note from the band:This song is one of the heavier ones on the album. We wanted the track to really kick your teeth in from the beginning. From a lyrical standpoint, the song is about one of the prominent characters from the Indian epic poem, The Mahabharata. The story of Ashwathama is one of consequences, pain, and redemption. One moment of unchecked aggression leads him to lifetimes of torment as atonement. Ashwathama's journey fit right in with theme of Ruin which was pain and suffering, and whether the characters could either rise above it or were buried by it.
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Shadows in the Corner: Five Spectral Doom Metal Releases Haunting 2020
Music is generally a decent escape for me, but even in the best of years keeping track of new releases is tough -- embarking on a YouTube odyssey or checking out a recommended album requires battling the decision fatigue that generally has fully set in by the time of day that I'm actually able to listen to stuff uninterrupted. This year, of course, things have just gone to shit entirely, so I've pretty much hit a lifetime low in music discovery. I can think of multiple times that I've heard from someone that an album was good, skimmed past multiple positive reviews of it on my social feeds, seen a YouTube stream for it show up as a suggested video, and still not listened to it. However, I've managed to get a decent grip on the new-but-hopefully-not-forever normal, adjusted my routines, and in the past few weeks, redoubled my inspection of the year's releases so far -- of which there've been many, despite the extra challenges now present in any recording effort. While there've been some quality albums I listened to but simply didn't "get", at the time, or had capacity to cover, a disturbingly large number never even made it onto my radar -- and appear to have been missed in general. Langdon Hickman recently sifted out six exquisite death metal picks for your consideration, but I've targeted a different genre. These are the fuzz-ridden spectres that unquietly lie in wait behind the veil of sleep; rumbling titans buried beneath the earth. Lurking just outside your vision, here's five doom metal albums that perhaps missed their fair share of fanfare but offer high-quality listening to those who dare to seek them out.
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Cardinals Folly - Defying The Righteous Way March 6th, 2020
Cardinals Folly seems like a band that certainly could have played by the numbers: bash out a bunch of solid doom songs, pack them with gloom and sadness, and you're off to the races, especially with the talent of the band and the impressive vocal delivery of bassist/vocalist Count Karnstein. Instead, five albums in, they're still adding a crucial, irresistible element to their traditional doom core that sets them apart from the pack: sheer insanity.
While songs like "Stars Align Again" are super-solid riffers with just a shade of deviance to them, further on we come to "Witchfinders," where punky and uptempo instrumentation finds Karnstein swapping between grievous screams and his usual somber intonation without warning or pattern. As if that was just a bout of temporary madness, the following track "The Great Santur" spends its entire eight minutes in full-bore molasses-tier doom mode. Plenty of bands make killer albums without breaking away from doom metal's usual tropes, but being able to deliver those while also occasionally upping the ante to break away from predictability makes for memorable listening.
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Wicked Wizzard - Warlords of the Dark Realms March 21, 2020
Although the intro track for the album is markedly subdued, the rest of Warlords of the Dark Realms is a fantastical voyage into the realms of early stoner rock. Packed with whirlwinds of chunky riffs and lengthy lead portions, the energetic stomps contained here are only occasionally interrupted by quieter bass-driven segments for the sake of diversity. The rhythm section provides the force, but the guitars shape that force into numerous explorations of retro-minded rock. Ranging from proto-metallish chugging to drawn-out jams, this could easily pass as a neglected record from the 1980s that's just been waiting to be discovered on a dusty shelf.
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Of Wolves - Balance July 4th, 2020
Musically running a gamut from straight-up punk to grisly sludge, there are two constants in Balance that tie things together: first, the knotted and oozing tones that both bass and guitar produce, and second, unbridled rage. Of Wolves has been around for a long time -- over ten years -- and the anger and discontent that sparked the band originally has, with the change in the political climate in the last few years, kindled into an all-consuming blaze.
Balance pulls off a balancing act of its own: the band's messages come through loud and clear, but these songs kick ass on their own without needing any higher purpose to validate them. A heavy emphasis on rhythmic switchups and precise grooves lets the rhythm section drive aggressive tracks with punishingly tight cooperation, while the dynamic title track and "Clear Cutting/Bloodshed/Heart to Hand" show a capacity for developing atmospheric tension and then reaping its rewards via crushing slowness and blood-curdling screams.
I saw Of Wolves play some of these songs live last year -- in a bakery, no less, that doubles as a live venue and a bar. Even against a backdrop of chocolatey baked goods with a scant five feet between band and crowd, Of Wolves' furious multi-genre concoction can cut into your very core.
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Velvet Merlin - Wizard Tamer June 15, 2020
Wizard Tamer sounds like it was recorded in a damp basement. Actually, scratch that -- it sounds like it was performed in said damp basement while it was recorded from a neighboring basement. And yet, it sounds pretty good -- it captures that extra-rough feeling of bootleg 1970s records and shoddy demo tapes where warbling bass tones sometimes swell to ridiculous proportions and dominate the mix ever so satisfyingly as the drums do their best to pound through and guitar wails on in the background. The organs that the dubiously-named "Evol Derrick" adds take on an extra B-movie-horror-style thrill in this soundscape, where they screech and scrape in the borders of the mix.
Frankly, I can't understand a single damn word of the lyrics, reverb-packed as the vocals are, but with song titles like "Semen Portal" and "Shadow Diddler," I generally get the idea. This is inebriated stoner madness at its best: huge doomy riffs draped with campy shock rock trappings, performed by a band with the chops (and more importantly, the audacity) to throw in a twenty-minute live jam at the end of the album. It's weird, messy, and ridiculous -- and it comes strongly recommended because of all that. The tag line on the Bandcamp page really says it all:
IF IT SOUNDS FUCKED UP ITS BECAUSE WE WERE
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Dun Ringill - Library of Death July 31st, 2020
You know, libraries aren't usually associated with death -- it's pretty abnormal to die in one, after all. Similarly, Library of Death is a pretty unusual album -- Dun Ringill, hailing from Sweden but taking their name from an old Scottish fort (or maybe the Jethro Tull song), offers up some truly old-school doom that weaves folk influence into their oddly-instrumented interludes and also into the heavy riffs that dominate the band's compositions. This combination works astoundingly well, and it's really been tapped far too infrequently and barely ever in combination with the traditional-minded riff-centric approach that Dun Ringill takes.
Stately, formal, and malevolent, Library of Death is lawful evil put into musical form. Frontman Tomas Eriksson sings and growls in precisely measured time, careful to let venom drip from his words as he bids listeners welcome in the title track "Library of Death". Each dour riff feels crafted by sinister hands, relishing in minor keys and down-turned phrases that put a chill into listeners' spines. A highlight for me is "My Funeral Song," which starts off with an especially gloom-ridden introduction laced with delightful use of cello before the doom daze takes hold.
It'll make you a statistical outlier, sure, but I highly recommend stepping into the Library of Death -- there's no better riffs among which to take your last breath.
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Höstblod’s Beautiful “Dikter om döden” Weaves Together Extremes (Full Album Stream)
It's strange when something so tender carries such a weight. It feels unfamiliar, but still comforting. The heavy blanket of emotion envelops the listener in layers, revealing an immobilizing complexity. Höstblod operates within these two worlds of emotive expression, finding the warmth and intimacy of familiar emotion and the crushing mass of the inherent darkness found within the more despondent realms of passion. The complex Dikter om döden, translated to "Poems About Death," straddles these two emotional dominions, but also musically finds itself in a bit of a grey area, as well. Two halves woven together, the delicate folk-and-Romantic inspired music finds itself at glorious, dynamic odds with the black metal which often follows. Listen to an exclusive full-album stream of Dikter om döden below.
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Complexity aside, sole musician Johan Nilsson's music distills to an aching longing, something from deep at the foot of the soul. The cry of violins, the soft finger-plucking of a nylon-string guitar, the actual howling of the human voice -- it all boils down to this distinct style which Nilsson built for himself on 2018's Mörkrets intåg, but with a stronger sense of metallic identity and even more drastic dynamic changes. For such an easy, quick listen -- the 40 minutes fly by fairly quickly -- Höstblod's music offers so much substance, so much emotional depth and musical skill, that it warrants future spins. This is truly gorgeous music which is deserving of more attention....
Dikter om döden releases August 10th on Le Narthécophore. Tapes will follow on Folkvangr Records and Winter Sky Records. Follow Höstblod on Facebook and Bandcamp.Support Invisible Oranges on Patreon and check out our merch.
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All photos by Levan Tk. Follow Levan on Instagram at @levan_tk
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