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Review: Cannibal Corpse/Municipal Waste/Immolation/Schizophrenia, Bristol Beacon
Rumour has it that after this show was booked, the Beacon received a call from another major local venue asking whether they had any idea what they were letting themselves in for.
There’s certainly enhanced and somewhat nervous-looking security milling around Bristol’s most expensive live music venue at 5:30pm, while a huge queue is already snaking around the foyer to the merch stand as punters wait patiently to get their paws on those covetable Butchered at Birth T-shirts.
is needed now More than ever
Inside the hall, Belgium’s Schizophrenia have the unenviable task of kicking off the evening’s death metal frenzy to a fairly sparse audience. They’ve brought their own giant banners, but alas the sound is rather muddy and feeble.
Luckily, they have an ace up their sleeve in the form of a crowd-pleasing cover of Slayer’s Necrophiliac (” . . . a song about having sex with dead people,” we’re informed, a tad unnecessarily). Sure, the guitarists aren’t exactly King and Hanneman. But since Jeff is no longer with us, nobody is these days. Schizophrenia make a pretty good fist of it and even manage to conjure up the Beacon’s very first circle pit, although this is a band you’d rather see in a sweaty club than on such a big stage.
The sound is miraculously improved and the crowd fills out for New York veterans Immolation, whose impressive brand of technical death metal has been highly influential.
Interestingly, the lengthy compositions from new album Acts of God, notably An Act of God and Noose of Thorns, prove more impressive than the older stuff stretching back to 1991’s Dawn of Possession, with some powerful guitar work from Robert Vigna and Alex Bouks.
The secret of a successful show like this is to shake things up a bit. Nobody (OK, very few people) wants to hear four death metal bands in succession because, well, other flavours of metal are available. Richmond, Virginia thrashers Municipal Waste are the odd band out on this bill. Fortunately, Bristol absolutely loves Municipal Waste. And the feeling seems to be mutual. They once stuck around after a show at the Academy to play another gig at the Golden Lion pub on Gloucester Road the following evening.
“Look at all these security guys!” remarks Tony Foresta, waving at the solid wall of 14 (count ’em!) beefy gents lined up along the front of the stage (with additional torch-wielding spotters stationed on the lower tier, alert to any signs of misbehaviour). “Let’s start crowd-surfing or they’ll get bored.” Waves of bodies are soon hurtling towards the stage.
These gigs can easily turn ugly at venues that are not used to this music and its audience. But to be fair to the Beacon, the security team they’ve brought in seem to know what they’re doing and treat punters with respect and empathy after hauling them into the pit and unleashing them into the wild again (mostly to go round and crowd-surf some more).
Although Foresta jokingly tries to encourage some balcony diving (“Not you – you’re too big. Stay up there,” he tells one eager prospective participant), he’s been doing this long enough to orchestrate the chaos safely.
Wisely given that this isn’t necessarily their usual audience, the Waste serve up a set of tried-and-tested material, with plenty of songs from recent album Electrified Brain, which soon gets heads banging. It’s always a joy to hear Breathe Grease, The Thrashin’ of the Christ, Headbanger Face Rip and Wave of Death, and as usual they climax with the enjoyably dumbass Born to Party, which gets everyone chanting “Municipal Waste is gonna fuck you up!”
American goremongers Cannibal Corpse have been making a disgusting racket for rather more than thirty years now and are all well into their fifties. Fortunately, they show no sign of slowing down or developing good taste, as we discover when George ‘Corpsegrinder’ Fisher romantically dedicates Fucked with a Knife to all the ladies in the audience. He’s a big lad is Mr. Corpsegrinder and sings from the very depths of his ample gut when he’s not windmilling his waist-length hair. The uncharitable might suggest he sounds like an especially angry XL bully.
The security team are certainly earning their money as a tidal wave of crowd-surfers launch themselves stagewards while the Corpse rattle through a career-spanning set. In truth, there’s been very little of what one might term ‘progression’ in their music, which has stuck to the same template since the early days, so Disposal of the Body from 1998’s Gallery of Suicide fits in neatly alongside the likes of Blood Blind and Summoned for Sacrifice from the band’s latest release, Chaos Horrific. But although this is certainly brutal and intense music, it’s also weirdly hypnotic.
The band even take personnel changes in their stride. Since Cannibal Corpse last played here, guitarist Erik Rutan has taken over from Pat O’Brien. But Rutan has a long history in the genre and with Cannibal Corpse, having produced several of their albums, so the transition has been seamless.
At one point late in the show, Corpsegrinder sprints off the stage into the wings, leaving his bandmates looking confused as they play a covering instrumental. Turns out he’d been, ahem, caught short. “In all my years with this band, I have never shit myself on stage,” he tells us upon his return, allegedly ten pounds lighter. Cue: audience chant of “Shit your pants! Shit your pants!” Yep, it turns out that his vocals are genuinely bowel-loosening.
They conclude, as usual, with Hammer Smashed Face (y’know – the one from Ace Ventura: Pet Detective), leaving the Beacon more or less intact – although there were a couple of ambulances parked outside when we left. One imagines that everyone here is delighted at how successfully the evening passed off – except, perhaps, whoever is charged with cleaning the backstage toilet – and we can look forward to plenty more death metal at the venue in future.
All pix by Mike Evans
Read more: Metal & Prog Picks: September 2024
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