By Lisa Burke
December 4th 2015, The Regent, Los Angeles CA: Metal shows are therapy for the soul serenaded by an escape from reality if you let them be, and last Friday December 4th, 2015, I took my soul to death metal therapy at The Regent in downtown Los Angeles featuring headliners The Black Dahlia Murder and support acts Goatwhore, Iron Reagan, Entheos, and Artificial Brain.
I arrived during the anticipation of crossover thrash band Iron Reagan‘s set, and was pleasantly enlightened by their commanding, fast and fun performance. This band formed as a side-project collaboration featuring members from Municipal Waste and Darkest Hour. Quality vocalists not only engage the audience with powerful melodies and lyrics, but they also give good commentary between songs to keep the attention and excitement at the highest levels. The singer of Iron Reagan, Tony Foresta, perfectly exemplified this great commentary by not only preaching his passions but also by pushing the audience to mosh harder, saying their moshing wasn’t good enough for him, and also by offering to give away a skateboard prize to the third person to crowd surf. Of course, due to the laws of natural selection, the first person to crowd surf was the guy wearing the Obituary t-shirt and the winner was the blue-haired girl. Moving onto the thrashy tunes, the energy was high and the bass was pumping with cranked-up-to-eleven sucess. The style of this project has similar qualities to Tankard and Anthrax with a small amount of hardcore and an occasional splashdance of punk thrown in. Topping it off with some talented hair whipping, and the ever popular non love song ‘Your Kid’s An Asshole’ spanning around twenty seconds total, you can bet you’ve just had yourself a good time.
Three great aspects of the Regent is that first of all it’s a fairly intimate yet mid-sized venue where the floor rakes uphill from the stage being the lowest point to the entrance way being at the highest point, so there are no bad views, which allows you to take a photo of the band instead of the guys fist in front of you. The third attribute is the friendly and easy going staff and security to make the night more comfortable. As if the night at the Regent couldn’t get much better, Goatwhore takes the stage and the audience can’t get enough. Frontman Ben Falgoust has very charismatic stage presence that you can not shy away from, and his demanding godlike poses with his leather studded guantlets that span wrist to elbow can only further enunciate the often satanic lyrical groans, long sexy growls, and deadly melodies. The thrashy undertones perfectly mixed with death metal style guitar riffage and sporadically intense blackened thrash metal blast beats timed in with the dark vocals sets this band on a very highly unique and creatively successful level. A fun quirky trait that you can count on from Ben is that he will always rock some serious air guitar between vocals and no matter how much wear and tear he puts on that air guitar you can count on those leather guantlets he wears to outlive the entire human race. The credit on those and other leather accessories worn by Goatwhore among other metal artists goes out to Diggers Leatherwork. This performance in terms of energy and sound quality may have been my absolute favorite of the times I’ve seen Goatwhore, and the most amazing song of the night goes to ‘FBS (Fucked By Satan)’ for its wonderful death metal qualities and some really brilliant guitar riffs with catchy lyrics. On a last note for anytime Goatwhore is touring, you do not want to play after them. They are way too interesting and can seriously hold their own live too well to not be the headliners, especially on a tour where The Black Dahlia Murder plays directly after them.
Goatwhore set list:
01. An End to Nothing
02. Reanimated Sacrifice
03. Alchemy of the Black Sun Cult
04. Judgement of the Bleeding Crown
05. Cold Earth Consumed in Dying Flesh
06. Externalize This Hidden Savagery
07. FBS
08. Nocturnal Conjuration of the Accursed
09. The All-Destroying
10. Baring Teeth For Revolt
Michigan-based death metal band The Black Dahlia Murder took the stage around 10:45 and played a one-hour long song with a few moments of organized quality chaos interspersed. Seriously though, they call themselves melodic death metal yet in my opinion it is deathcore with some hardcore habits. This was my first live experience of TBDM and I must say I was impressed with the band’s overall skill and the singer’s ability to jump from death vocals to slightly more melodic singing yet still very much in a hardcore vein. His over pacing and loony conducting may need a Xanax, but if you are into that kind of organized chaos perhaps you enjoyed it. Around midway through, they played the title track from the latest album ‘Abysmal’ and while they have attempted to incorporate more complex elements than they previously did, it really just sounds faster and heavier which isn’t necessarily changing from deathcore to melodic death metal which seemed to be the goal as they describe themselves in this genre. Don’t get me wrong, this is good music and a skilled band, and I particularly enjoyed the drumming although I feel there are moments where the blast beats could be interspersed with some more creativity rather than remaining so constant. If they remove the hardcore habits from the vocals and guitar moments and brought in more melodies in the vein of At The Gates for example, then that outside-the-box level would be achieved. To their credit, if they played a shorter set and before Goatwhore I’m sure I would have enjoyed it more as well as if I never heard Five Finger Death Punch who in my opinion is a weak band with a high influence from The Black Dahlia Murder. I love death metal and deathcore but this particular style of it is typically not my thing and the lack of variety within itself unfortunately led to what felt like them playing me an hour-long funeral march.
Regardless of whether you are in total agreement or not, this is a tour worth experiencing. Also, thank you to Iron Reagan who has me even more excited for the Municipal Waste tour coming up early next year, also pit stopping at the Regent. So please open your mind and get out there to support some death metal therapy wherever you are and whenever you can.
The Black Dahlia Murder set list:
01. Receipt
02. What a Horrible Night to Have a Curse
03. On Stirring Seas of Salted Blood
04. Threat Level No. 3
05. Vlad, Son of the Dragon
06. Moonlight Equilibrium
07. Elder Misanthropy
08. Abysmal
09. Unhallowed
10. Funeral Thirst
11. Everything Went Black
12. A Vulgar Picture
13. I’m Charming
14. Raped in Hatred by Vines of Thorn
15. Miasma
16. Statutory Ape
17. Deathmask Divine
18. I Will Return
Remaining Tour Dates:
12/11 – Atlanta, GA @ Masquerade
12/12 – Tampa, FL @ The Orpheum
12/14 – Baltimore, MD @ Baltimore Soundstage
12/15 – Philadelphia, PA @ Union Transfer
12/16 – New York, NY @ Gramercy Theatre
12/17 – Boston, MA @ The Sinclair
12/18 – Buffalo, NY @ Waiting Room
12/19 – Pittsburgh, PA @ Mr. Smalls
12/20 – Cleveland, OH @ Agora Theatre
12/26 – Detroit, MI @ Majestic Complex (Black Christmas)
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