WEEK OF 11/29/2019

Exhumed / 📷 : Mick Reed

Alexi Front is proving himself to be a bit of a wizard when it comes to event planning. Earlier this year he treated the woolen saber-toothed wildebeest of Chicago’s metal tribe to the seventh incarnation of his annual extreme sound collage festival. Scorched Tundra XI (see coverage here) is a festival which is increasingly becoming something akin to a Midwestern Roadburn. Now that Chicago is firmly in the grips of winter, Front did the metal devotees of our fair city another solid by conjuring a hot wave of west and soutwestern death metal to defrost are ears and warm our rotten hearts, making it just that much easier to survive another deadly snow season in the corridors of the concrete meat locker we call home. I am of course talking about the co-headlined Exhumed and Gatecreeper show that took place at the Empty Bottle on November 20, 2019. .

The night opened with the thousand-pound hammer swing of Texas’s Judiciary. Judiciary is a young band with a massive sound combining classic thrash grooves and OSDM vocals with the force and hostility of modern beatdown hardcore. Think of the cross-over thrash of Power Trip overlapping with the rattling metalcore of a group like Vatican, and you’ll have the right frame of reference to appreciate their caustic brand of punishing punk rock ‘n’ roll. Their set punched a hole clean through my chest as they launched through cuts off of their 2019 release, Surface Noise. I was particularly impressed with the barrel bomb drop of “Social Crusade” and slippery, brain tenderizing whip of “Burden of Truth.” It was a savage and cathartic set from a band breathing fresh life into tried and true sounds of fetid Floridian death metal.

It was about halfway through Judiciary’s excellent set that I not only noticed how young the guys in the band were, but also how young the crowd was that turned up to see them. Roughly half the attendees looked like they were either freshly 21, or at least not old enough to rent a car without their parent’s signature. This realization was a weird and special moment for me. I’m roughly middle-aged, and yet I’m on the younger side at most metal shows I roll up on. When I look around at the graying hair and creased faces at a High on Fire or Goatwhore show, I’m perpetually curious if the music that I love, and gives me reason to get out of bed in the morning, is losing its grip on the pulse of society, fading away into irrelevance, no-longer capable of connecting with future generations, or able to offer salient social critic. At least from what I could see that Wednesday night at the Bottle, the searing critic of artists working in these lanes has continued to inform the social imagination of generations on the up-and-up, and they are ready to burn sh*t down with this indignant cry as their soundtrack. I would have thought the demographics of Judiciary’s crowd was a fluke, but the ranks of the fresh-faced phalanx only swelled as the night progressed. If anyone asks, the kids aren’t alright, and that should give us all hope for the future.

Oakland’s Necrot took the stage less than 20 minutes after Judiciary wrapped up. There was almost no breathing room between sets, and the efficiency of the take down and set up for each band helped keep the intensity of the evening high. I barely had time to grab a beer and make my way back to the stage before the Necrot’s vocalist Luca Indrio announced that they were beginning their set, grinning broadly from behind the mic before unleashing the apocalyptic excess of his soul-rending, down-tuned bass and tortured growl upon our waiting ears. Necrot has a familiar sound for fans of Swedish-inclined 90s American death metal. But the wet and grisly, tendon twisting plunge of their sound places them significantly closer to the gore-metal of Exhumed than the sun-stroke heat of the similarly Swe-death influenced Gatekeeper. Throw in a little crust punk and you’ve got a recipe for a sound that is straight up virulent. I had heard tails from fellow local metalheads that Necrot were the next best thing to seeing Bolt Thrower in their prime, if those iron-sided legends played at full gas the entire set. This was my first time seeing Necrot, and I can now personally attest to the accuracy of this statement. Necrot, unlike many of their influences, don’t care to balance their performance with mid-tempo numbers. It can be a little suffocating to see them play as a result, but frankly this discomfort only adds to their appeal as reigning barons of brutality. Despites punishing nature (or really because of it) I was cheering for an encore by the end of Necrot’s set, and had they been the headliner, I think I could have left happy that evening. But as it was, we were only on the precipice of the main event.  

 Exhumed and Gatecreeper have had a remarkable 2019. They both released albums to critical acclaim this year (Horror and Deserted, respectively [my review of the latter can be found here]) as well as a 10-inch split that straight-up rips. It would have been great to see either one of these bands stop in Chicago, but having them on the same bill was nothing short of the fulfillment of some dark prophecy- you’d have to be fluent in Sanskrit to appreciate in its gravity. And without spoiling the reminder of this review, both sets lived up to these very high expectations.     

 Gatecreeper took the stage first. Being the younger of the two bands, this was appropriate. They’ve been making waves since their 2016 LP Sonoran Deprivation, giving a distinctly southwestern twist on the punk-infused death metal of groups like Entombed and Grave. They’re a surprising upstart in the current musical scene, but others and I enthusiastically embrace their presence. Back lit by sickly green light and engulfed in a gauzy pink and purple haze, Gatecreeper appeared to perform against the backdrop of a sunset on an alien world. The atmosphere helped to extend the extremity of vocalist Chase Mason’s sky-cracking howl, the blistering rock bleaching guitar work of Eric Wagner and Nate Garret, and the sand-parting grooves of bassist Sean Mears. Watching Mason bitterly stalk the stage before lunging into the microphone in an anguished cry, flanked by his bandmates unleashing a grim, parched shock-wave of sound, made the message of their music, one of environmental degradation and struggle against authoritarianism, all the more urgent and believable. When they dove into the rolling toss of “Puncture Wounds,” it felt like the room was turned upside down as bodies were flung in every direction, with those able to keep their footing eagerly surging toward the stage. Thankfully the pit subsided long enough during the pensive opening of “Ruthless” for me to get in a few good photos of Mason and co. before I was rushed off my feet again by the ensuing swell of the circle-pit inspired by that song’s ruthless builds and tension releases. Gatecreeper have an incredible command of the crowd while playing, and it is no wonder that they are often cited as a leading voice at the forefront of the OSDM revival.

 The crowd may have been a little wrung out after an exceptionally fearsome Gatecreeper set, but they quickly regained their steam once Exhumed ascended the stage. They were introduced by their mascot: a deranged, blood-drenched and mute surgeon, who neurotically fumbled with a remote control to turn on twin, wood-paneled television sets that had been positioned on either side of the band, and which broadcast trailers for “classic” and cult horror films to compliment the gruesome soundtrack that Exhumed pry out of their instruments. This brief introduction was not the last we saw of the mad surgeon, as he reappeared several times during the set to terrorize the audience with a chainsaw, play a guitar with a buzz-saw, and dump blood and viscera onto the crowd with the aid of a severed head he pulled out of a medical supplies bag. Exhumed for their part, they crushed it. They tore through material off of Horror and earlier releases with the poise of professional athletes and the giddy, perverse joy of middle schoolers at a Nickelodeon theme park. The combination of light-hearted fun and stomach-turning visuals was a welcome detour form the straight-faced, grievous onslaught that had proceeded it. Band leader Matt Harvey is the rare death metal musician that cares to cultivate a semblance of showmanship, and the carnivalesque atmosphere of their set cemented it as a uniquely genuine experience within the spectrum of heavy music. Enthusiastic Carcass inspired riffs ripped cross hapless ear-drums while corpse-stew clotted vocals bubbled and popped, allowing for wet, goopy, and surprisingly catchy hooks to spore into the air like sounds of dumpster cinema pouring into an autopsy room. The aural equivalent of an abattoir exploding in a hurricane. It was hard to believe that any of us retained enough of our sanity to cheer through both encores.

On November 20, 2019, patrons of the Empty Bottle were given the opportunity to savor a Chaudhary board worth of grotesque images: biopsied organs, callused severed figures, malevolent horned icons, septic operating theaters, and gore plaque logging tools- conjured by unearthly screams and guttural, gurgling groans. Equally parts inspiring and horrifying, the co-headlined Exhumed and Gatecreeper show was, if nothing else, proof that death metal in 2019 is thriving, even if humanity itself, according to scientific consensus, may be on its last leg. That night I saw death metal’s garish and cartoonish past, its youthful present, and a glimpse at its hard-nosed and die-hard future. I don’t know where the genre is headed next, how long OSDM will keep its hold on the imaginations of up and coming artists, or if a mello-death revival is just around the corner, and frankly, I don’t care. As long as it’s brutal, I’ll be there, and I hope you will be, too.  

-Mick Reed