Death Metal as a genre has been in existence for around 30 years now.
It involves devilish low-pitch vocals that often sound like an incoherent growl.
Ultra-fast drums, guitars and bass accompany the invective hurled by the vocalist.
To the uninitiated, it all sounds like a cacophonic blur, but it takes a lot of skill for the instruments to be played at such speed.
The death part of the nomenclature refers to the grisly subject matter often used in song lyrics.
First thing’s first, let’s discuss the support band and a worthy one at that.
Neuroma proudly proclaimed from the off that they are from Liverpool, which seeing as they were in Manchester you would think unwise but such city rivalries do not apply in the world of Metal.
They play a chaotic style of technical death metal with multiple time signature changes.
The complexity was often lost in the limited mixing that the venue afforded them, especially in the vocals. That fortuitously gave them a Cannibal Corpse feel that I think they’d be happy about.
Their choice of subject matter was predictably dark but absurd. One song called “Planet of the Gapes” was about an orang-utan being used as a sex slave.
Another song was called “Centipaedophile”, a depraved song about the fusing together of a gang of paedophiles to become one evil beast. Scary stuff.
Only Dave Vincent and Trey Azagthoth remain of the original line-up and the years have been kinder to one than the other.
Trey doesn’t look any different and as usual, looks like a guitarist possessed, unleashing satanically evil solos that are the equivalent of invoking the most dangerous Lovecraftian daemon you can imagine.
Whilst the support band had a chaotic feel to their music, Morbid Angel’s music is extremely controlled, focussed, crushing. It is the aural embodiment of pure evil.
Dave Vincent’s thunderous voice fully immerses all with his evil incantations and has a synergy with all the instruments.
The murderous intent in his voice is delivered with such sincerity you’re not going to argue with him. This is horror music without any cheese whatsoever. None more black.
The Angels of Morbidity sped through their ground-breaking third album Covenant on its twentieth anniversary with devastating accuracy and potency. No prisoners were taken.
Each Morbid Angel album moves up the alphabet and they proceeded to play a song from each subsequent album.
It was hard to see where they could go after playing such a classic album but the choice of first song “Where The Slime Live” left everyone in no doubt that Morbid Angel weren’t finished with us yet and had more slaying to do.
For the last 2 songs, Morbid Angel brought out a couple of big guns from their first two albums “Fall From Grace” from Blessed Are The Sick and “Immortal Rites” from Altars of Madness.Songs that demonstrate that if you’re music is amazing, time will not diminish its awesomeness.
They didn’t play an encore after that. They didn’t need to. Everyone was blown away by what they had just seen. Death Metal is alive and well.