PESTILENCE at Blå (Oslo, Norway)
Special Guests: CARNOSUS – BLEEDING GODS
Thursday, March 7, 2019
by Jorge Patacas
Having the chance to see a legendary Dutch Death Metal band like Pestilence is not something that happens everyday. Their first albums contributed with a technical approach to a scene that was having a great impact worldwide, in the early 90’s. On this tour, thirty years after the release of their second album, the unforgettable “Consuming Impulse”, the band is playing it in its entirety to the delight of their most hardcore fans.
It was a cold Thursday night in the Norwegian capital, but inside Blå, the venue chosen for the show, the public was eager to hear good Old School Death Metal. After checking the merch stands of the three bands, we approached the stage.
The group responsible for opening the night was Carnosus, from Örebro, Sweden, with a style within Death Metal standards with melodic elements, although they don’t sound like the Gothenburg Melodeath bands or like the traditional Death of the historical bands from Stockholm. The quintet was formed in 2011 and has an EP entitled “The Universal Culmination” (2016) as well as the singles “Lost to Funereal Desires” (2017) and “Subjected to Cadaverous Defilement” (2018). Although the band is still very underground, they have what it takes to get bigger within the scene.
Then it was the turn for the Dutch band Bleeding Gods, who last year released their second album “Dodekathlon”, first one via Nuclear Blast, receiving very good reviews of it. Both in the musical and aesthetic aspect, the band has been inspired by the Symphonic Black Metal, although they also include Death Metal in their sound with their fast-paced riffs close to Thrash sometimes, while the lyrics are about wars and ancestral gods, being the mentioned record of 2018 inspired by Greek mythology. While there was no song that has stood out from the rest in their performance, what caught the attention of the audience was mainly the solos by the guitarist Ramon Ploeg, the harsh vocals of Mark Huisman, and the atmospheric layers created by the keyboardist David Gutierrez Rojas.
With the guitarist and vocalist Patrick Mameli as the only original member, the legendary Pestilence came out to destroy the venue with “Dehydrated” followed by the rest of the tracks of the mentioned album “Consuming Impulse”, which contains classics such as “Out of the Body” and “Reduced to Ashes”. Even though there was not much moshpit, the crowd responded in a very positive way even asking for songs; in fact someone requested the song “Before the Penance” from their demo “The Penance” (1987), to which the leader of the band replied that it was not possible that night, but he appreciated his words. This shows how intimate the concert was and the very good interaction between bands and audience in a small place like Blå.
The rest of the lineup consisting of Calin Paraschiv on guitar, Edward Negrea on bass and Septimiu Harsan on drums live up to the expectations and they make the sound that established Pestilence in the international Death scene still alive and well beyond the passage of time, and Mamelli himself at 51 years old, can still deal with a show that requires a lot of vocal effort. The quartet displayed all their ammunition with technical and at times thrashing riffs, but always within Death Metal standards in that particular style that Dutch bands have developed that differentiate them from their peers from Florida or Sweden.
There was also time for material from his other efforts such as the great “Twisted Truth” and “The Secrecies of Horror” that opens their “Testimony of the Ancients” album (1991), as well as “Horror Detox” from their “Resurrection Macabre” album (2009), where the frontman emphasized that this album and the later ones are also good and not only their first four albums that are the most remembered ones.
Before saying goodbye, they announced that they would return for the thirtieth anniversary of “Testimony of the Ancients” and finished with an anthem of that album called “Land of Tears”. Then it was time to return to our homes, but with the satisfaction of having seen an Old School Death Metal glory that has been an influence to countless bands both in their native country and abroad.
SETLIST BLEEDING GODS
01- Bloodguilt
02- Beloved by Artemis
03- Saviour of Crete
04- Birds of Hate
05- Tripled Anger
06- Hera’s Orchard
07- From Feast to Beast
SETLIST PESTILENCE
01- Dehydrated
02- The Process of Suffocation
03- Suspended Animation
04- The Trauma
05- Chronic Infection
06- Out of the Body
07- Echoes of Death
08- Deify The Master
09- Reduced to Ashes
10- The Secrecies of Horror
11- Twisted Truth
12- Horror Detox
13- Land of Tears
