Music / Reviews
Review: Carcass/Unto Others/Conjurer, Fleece
As the rising stars of UK extreme metal, Conjurer have a perfect opportunity to set out their wares to a packed audience. Will they blow it? Will they fuck. Brutally heavy riffage? Check. Two flavours of growled vocals? Check. Heads-down hair flailing? Check. Complex, proggy arrangements? Check. At the end of their all-too-brief 30 minute opening slot, the bassist comes among us, leaping into the audience where a circle pit swiftly forms around him, threatening to swallow him up. By the end, all we can see is his guitar held aloft.
Portland’s Unto Others are the unlikely filling in tonight’s extreme metal sandwich. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Rush’s Subdivisions is played so loudly before they come on. The pigeonholers tell us they’re goth metal and while they certainly look the part, with frontman Gabriel Franco being a ‘shades indoors’ kinda guy, and occasionally sound a bit like The Cure playing metal, there’s something rather more old school about much of their slickly delivered material, which has a whiff of trad metal with a garagey twist.
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Guitarist Sebastian Silva even looks as though he could have stepped out of a 1980s hair metal video and has all the poses to match. They’ve got some strong songs too, notably Nightfall, When Will God’s Work Be Done and Give Me to the Night, though Dragon, Why Do You Cry? is the kind of title one might expect from a European power metal band.
Melodic death metal (or ‘melodeath’, if you really must) has become so ubiquitous that it’s easy to lose track of the fact that someone must have originated this stuff. In fact, it’s nearly 40 years since the second most influential band to come out of Liverpool – a bunch of hairy vegetarians with one foot in metal, the other in anarcho-punk and a well-thumbed medical dictionary to hand – came up with the idea of death metal with a melodic twist (“I’m closer to sixty than you are to thirty,” frontman/bassist Jeff Walker tells a heckler tonight). They swiftly became John Peel favourites and were even namechecked in Friends, but have been unusually quiet of late, leaving others to run with the ball.
So it’s hardly surprising that this first Bristol show in nearly a decade has been sold out for weeks. There are people here who look as though they can hardly believe their good fortune in seeing the scalpel-fixated gore-mongers again. Better yet, Carcass give us a balanced, career-spanning set reaching all the way back to 1989’s Symphonies of Sickness, while ‘Carcass TV’ (seemingly random, occasionally grisly imagery) plays on the video screens. All that’s missing is a detour into Walker’s oddly enjoyable country and western album, Welcome to Carcass Cuntry. But what’s most impressive is the band’s consistency despite those long gaps between albums, so The Scythe’s Remorseless Swing, a highlight of the recent-ish Torn Arteries, fits in perfectly right next to old favourite Corporal Jigsore Quandary.
Remarkably versatile former Napalm Death guitarist Bill Steer has turned his hand to a variety of genres over the years, but it’s great to see him firmly back in the metal fold cranking out those Carcass riffs again. Ever-droll Walker continues to growl his tongue-twisting lyrics with aplomb while playing bass in that trademark vertical position. In what may be a first, he also admonishes drummer Daniel Wilding for playing a solo that he considers not good enough and makes him do it again. It sounds exactly the same.
Let’s hope this Bloody Blighty tour has fired up their creative juices and we won’t have to wait another ten years before they pitch up to insult and deafen us again.
Read more: Metal & Prog Picks: June 2023
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