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Club Phoenix - Friday May 18 “I love the dead,” ‘70s shock rocker Alice Cooper once sang, and I cannot help but think that old Coops’ song would serve as a perfect anthem for the gathered throng in Club Phoenix tonight. The lads in The Dead, had been advertised as playing second tonight, and as such there were more than a few frantic scrambles from the club’s DJ and pool room as the rumbling sound of Brisbane’s finest doom-influenced, eclectic old school death metal band took hold of the room. Hacking and slashing their way through such gory epics as Hunting Humans, They Eat Their Wounded and, best of all, the sure striding, cavernously heavy closer The Doomsayer, these lads are the perfect warm up for Obituary.
Picture The End are next, and it’s obvious from their first tune that their Killswitch Engage-influenced modern metalcore is rather an absurd and ill fitting filling for tonight’s death metal sandwich. The chaps do their best, but it’s just not what most folk tonight are here for. Finally, the epochal pounding of Celtic Frost-derived instrumental (and latter day Obituary statement of intent) Redneck Stomp starts shaking the club, and in a sustained blast of some of the most unearthly distorted sounds I’ve heard issue forth from guitar, bass or drum (or throat for that matter – noted guttural gourmand John Tardy is everything one would expect him to be on the stage) Obituary unleash an impressive set evenly derived from all segments of their long career. Perennial favorite Chopped In Half is perhaps the biggest treat, with its stop start grooves realised perfectly on the live stage, but perhaps what is most striking is how well the band’s new material mingles with their classic older stuff. In a happy irony of nomenclature, Obituary are still truly alive and well roughly two decades on from their inception. SHAUN NANCARROW
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