Morbid Angel

Morbid Angel, HateSphere, Leng Tche at the Kulturfabrik in Esch/Alzette on April 14th, 2005

If you live in Luxemburg, you can't claim that there aren't many concerts worth visiting. People who give a shit about commercial bullshit recently had the chance to see lots of interesting and promising punk and hardcore acts. Especially the Out Of The Crowd 2 Festival was a real treat for the fans. But real raw and brutal metal only rarely finds its way to tiny Luxemburg. So I was very amazed when reading that Morbid Angels, the pioneers of Florida death metal, would play at the Kulturfabrik in Esch/Alzette. Necrophagist, one of Germany's most extreme bands, were supposed to be the opening act, but due to a sickness of a bandmember, they had to cancel the entire tour.

Their replacement was Leng Tche from Belgium who started at 8 pm right on time. It's important that concerts start early when they are not during the weekend, because alarm clocks have a tendency of ringing very early on weekdays and don't give a shit whether we went to a show or now. Back to Leng Tche who left a very positive impression. Although not all members were on the highest technical level, their intense stage acting and the huge and loud sound in the venue compensated this small problem. The best musician on stage was drummer Svencho who acted like a wild animal and played as if he was ODing on adrenaline. Some spectators thought that he also was the singer of Belgian grindband Aborted. Frontman Boris El Bastardo also was able to put the spectators into his ban. The musicians all had something in common. They liked to pose and the audience liked it. Someone compared them to Cephalic Carnage, but I think that this would be a too big compliment for Leng Tche who are nevertheless on the best way.

After a short break, HateSphere from Denmark played. Their music was completely different from Leng Tche and Morbid Angel as it had nothing in common with death metal. Their music can be described as groovy thrash metal which reminded me of the late Eighties thrash act Assassin from Germany or The Haunted from England. The songs were rather aggressive, but kept very simple. In the beginning, I found them very entertaining, but after about 20 minutes, the concert became quite repetitive and my attention fell. Or was this just another excuse to have an opportunity to go to the beer bar? But the very proll looking singer motivated the audience and quite a huge mosh-pit was formed in the first rows. HateSphere can be happy with this gig.

When Morbid Angel started playing at 10pm, there was a fast rush from the bar to the stage. I suppose that there must have been about 400 spectators, and all of them wanted to see Morbid Angel with the original members Trey Azagthoth, Pete Sandoval and David Vincent. By the way, most of the audience came from our neighbour countries which you discovered easily by listening to them talking and when leaving by having a look at the car number plates on the parking. I just wonder why Luxemburgers don't like menacing metal [they probably like it alright but prefer to stay home and listen to their CDs while they are wanking to some downloaded porn filth from the Internet... actually you are not allowed to wank at concerts, but you may smoke, which is much more harmful; ed.]. They truly missed one of the greatest metal events in Luxemburg because Morbid Angel fascinated me from the first to the last note. It was pure pleasure listening to Trey Azagthoth who was looking like the lost Ramones son who mistreated his guitar. Singer David Vincent who in between had to leave Morbid Angel due to some politically not too correct comments looked quite bizarre in his latex T-shirt. Maybe it's a souvenir from his former activities in the bondage/SM industrial band Genitortures. He's not a great bass player, but he's a showman who often searched the contact with the audience. As a singer, his growls were sounding great. The second guitar player looked a bit like a bit player, but he had to keep the rhythm because the bass didn't kick too much. Very impressing was the work done by drummer Pete Sandoval who played faster than Dave Lombardo without taking a break during the 70 minutes lasting gig. It was interesting to compare the older tracks to the newer ones. Old songs like 'Lord Of All Fevers Plague' and 'Blessed Are The Sick' are kept much simpler than the songs from their last album 'Heretic'. The mix of older and newer songs was well chosen. Absolute highlight was the last track of the concert when Morbid Angel spoiled us with their all time classic 'Chapel Of Ghouls', my favourite track from the 1989 Earache sampler.

The concert can be seen as a success for all the bands, the spectators and hopefully the Kulturfabrik, too. I just hope that similar concerts will be organised in the future.

presale: 16 €, doors : 18 €