By Andrew Bansal
[Videos by Arturo Gallegos]
April 9th 2014, Five Star Bar, Los Angeles CA: New Jersey black metal band Krieg had to cancel their entire US West Coast tour itinerary on extremely short notice due to multiple complicated circumstances. The announcement came just a day before the LA show of this tour at the Five Star Bar, but despite the absence of the headline act, the rest of the lineup for this show presented by Hate War Productions, consisting of three local extreme metal bands Harassor, Satani Infernalis and Aeternum, decided to go ahead and do the gig anyway, with a reduced ticket price of $5. Doors opened at 8, a fair few turned up, and the show began at 9.
Aeternum started things off with a 30-minute set filled to the brim with unadulterated black metal. This band has been around in the local underground for the past 15 years, releasing two demos in the process. During this set the quartet looked and sounded like experienced musicians who knew what they were doing, and besides the visual aspect of the corpse paint to go with the atmospheric nature of the music, they got their mix right and their overall sound came through strongly enough to fill this room and garner a decent applause at the end of the set, from a crowd that was small but constantly growing in numbers.
Check out a 15-minute video clip from their set below:
Visit Aeternum on the web:
facebook.com/Aeternum.Horde
metal-archives.com/bands/Aeternum/28594
Set List:
01. Forest
02. Entrance The Blood Of The Ancients
03. Rites Of The Blasphemer
04. Iconoclastic Perversions
05. Vestal Copulation
06. Lycanthrope
Next up were Satani Infernalis, another underground extreme metal that’s been in existence for almost as long as Aeternum. The trio brought forth more variety in their music, as aside from standard black metal passages they also infused slower, more riff-oriented segments that set the headbangers in motion. I did enjoy these slower tunes more as the guitar parts stood out with greater prominence in them. The mix wasn’t initially perfect but they tweaked and bettered it as they went along in the set. The third song ‘Mental Slavery’ was my favorite of the set and it came across as a real banger. This tune, along with three others from their latest ‘Death Posture’ EP closed out this set and served as an edible appetizer for the last band of the night.
Video clip:
Visit Satani Infernalis on the web:
facebook.com/Satani.Infernalis616
metal-archives.com/bands/Satani_Infernalis/98331
Set List:
01. Voices Of Woe
02. Midnight Black Mass
03. Mental Slavery
04. Places Of Plagues
05. Darkness Falls
06. Death Posture
At 11:15, Harassor took the stage. Having incorporated an element of unpredictability to the Harassor live experience in recent times, frontman Pete Majors varies his visual presentation from show to show, this time choosing not to drench himself in stage blood and showcasing a rawer version of the band wherein the focus was on the music more than anything else. He urged the crowd to participate, some of whom obliged but the majority still stood despondent, with little to no applause for the band even in between songs, which had nothing to do with the quality of the performance as it was great, but solely to do with a non-conformist mentality. I’ve said this before, it’s like headbanging and the good ol’ circle pits are going out of fashion in modern-day metal concert etiquette, but little do these attendees realize that they’ve actually made it a conformist thing. What’s supposedly the ‘hip’ thing to do is, in my opinion, more mainstream than the mainstream. Anyhow, I digress.
The band put forth a very dynamic set, ranging from slow passages a listener could absorb every note of, to contrastingly chaotic faster segments. They played a song off of the newly released Harassor/Glass Coffin split LP, along with a couple of other new tunes which will feature on their next full-length album due out in June. Pete Majors along with guitarist James L. Brown and drummer Sandor sounded killer as a group, despite Sandor busting his thumbnail halfway through the set. Harassor gave this gathering at the Five Star Bar a righteous slab of intense extreme metal and more than made up for Krieg’s absence.
The turnout was excellent considering the circumstances, with several members of LA’s underground metal community turning up to support the show, and the vibe at this venue was a perfect fit for the style of music. Fans of extreme metal are recommended to keep a tab on the activities of the bands that played the show, and LA locals are encouraged to attend future shows by this promoter and at this venue. An excellent night of underground music, overall.
Video clip:
Visit Harassor on the web:
facebook.com/HarassorBand
twitter.com/DoomDeath
instagram.com/DoomDeath
Harassor.bandcamp.com
Set List:
01. Purest Hate
02. Unknown Depths
03. Strangulated
04. 9 Ov Swords
05. Writhing In Pain
06. Winters Triumph
07. B.T.A.
08. Deathless Urge
09. M.D.P.
10. Ildjarn Is Dead
11. Increased Decay
12. Jam + Outro
Check out Arturo Gallegos’ YouTube channel:
youtube.com/SexThrash69
Visit Hate War Productions on the web:
facebook.com/pages/Hate-War-Productions/160239557354482
Visit Five Star Bar on the web:
FiveStarBarDTLA.com
facebook.com/FiveStarBarDTLA
twitter.com/FiveStarBarDTLA