Live Review: Exhumed to Consume Tour

Despite their oddly parallel breakup-reunion stories, the two headlining bands couldn’t be more dissimilar. Suffocation are a Long Island five-piece renowned for their technical proficiency, with a distinctly malevolent, humorless cast to their litanies of grave-robbing, cannibalism, &c. &c. In contrast, Carcass flirt with kitsch in their puerile embrace of all things gory: creating trompe l’oeil album covers out of autopsy photo collages, self-describing as “rot and roll,” and generally opting out of maturity with every aesthetic decision outside the music itself, which is among the most devastatingly melodic, structurally progressive metal ever conceived.

Having missed opening-slotters Rotten Sound and Aborted, we arrived just in time to catch the beginning of 1349’s set. 1349 perform a commendable impression of first-wave Norwegian black metal--full corpse paint, spikes, leather, and an unending barrage of aural vitriol, utterly lacking the gothic theatricality and commercial flirtations of newer bands. (The author's first exposure to 1349 was an inauspicious one: at an afternoon SXSW show last year, having spied the bass player sitting behind the stage, drinking a diet Coke and looking tired and bored in his sweat-streaked corpse paint. Not exactly a “Satan’s liege” moment. He skipped that show, but after this performance he won’t be skipping any more. Even Satan needs a diet Coke every now and then.)

Suffocation owned the stage from note one. Even the old-timers who no doubt saw them in the early '90s must have been floored by how tight they were. Song after song worked through labyrinthine time changes and ornate riffs, employing sudden, stuttering blasts of silence as effectively as other bands wield feedback. Guitarist Terrence Hobbs (who, along with drummer Mike Smith, were among the first black men to play death metal) flattened the crowd with his mercurial solos, while singer Frank Mullen came off like a hyperactive hybrid of Phil Anselmo and Tony Soprano. A bit of a ham, Mullen introduced signature tune “Pierced From Within” thusly: "This one's for the ladies...I love you girls, you drive me crazy, sometimes I just wanna cut you open and bathe in your entrails!! [mimes rending/splattering]...and then, you know, maybe take you out for a nice seafood dinner." Imagine it with a thick Long Island accent and try not to laugh.

Carcass brought a different sort of charisma to the stage, taking the stage to a heavily-reverbed sample of a mortician’s training tape (sampled extensively by the band) and a phalanx of revved-up fog machines. Carcass immediately lit into a trio of mid-period classics, including the immortal "Buried Dreams," with Odinesque ferocity. While the members are all excellent musicians, the drawing point of Carcass has always been the riffs, which cycle from brutal chugging to eerie melodicism with uncanny formal logic. Most of the tunes stretched past the six-minute mark, but the band never lost momentum for a second. Although there is more than a trace of humor in the band’s pseudo-kitsch aesthetic, the actual live experience was one of primal, transformative physical pummeling, further proof that a good live show almost negates the necessity of a good record. The first few tunes, charged with audience expectation, exemplified metal as a brutally direct projection of bad vibes into physical space. Carcass pioneered the "melodic" sub-genre of death metal, so those bad vibes were beamed out on arena-sized riffs that were catchy as shit.

Bassist/growler Jeff Walker, bearing an unwholesome resemblance to Eric Bana in “Chopper,” laid on the “my isn’t this all fun” smarm a bit thick later in the set, perhaps as a defense against any appearance of reunion-tour pandering. Still, he got in some zingers: after getting kicked in the face by a stage-diver, he launched into a half-serious tirade about moshing: “Whatever happened to headbanging? Oh that’s right: you’re all going bald.” He even shared a joke he learned hanging out with Napalm Death in the '80s:

Q: What’s the difference between a feminist and a dustbin?

A: A dustbin gets taken out at least once a week.

Hail Satan! And/or Andrea Dworkin. Scarcely a week after the release of yet another pre-fossilized Metallica album, Exhumed to Consume was a pungent reminder of how rich and compelling metal can be. There is nothing cynical about these bands getting back together: it’s the fans doing the exhuming here, and for good reason. Some things just shouldn’t stay dead.