Live Review: Psycroptic, Goatwhore, Disentomb, Ouroboros

It’s a top-to-bottom blockbuster line-up for extreme music fans tonight at Crowbar, and the basement club is filling quickly as Sydney’s Ouroboros start shredding up a storm. The quartet set the tone for how the bands are operating tonight; get on, play your best stuff and get off – it’s refreshing to see such a high level of professionalism on a tour.

Local slam crew Disentomb receive the welcome of hometown heroes and grind out a set deserving of such a welcome. Over the scarcely relenting guttural vocals, the band carves off chunks of meaty death metal that satisfy even the most extreme appetites.

There are two bands doing everything you’d want them to in modern-day blackened death metal scene; Watain and Goatwhore. Unfortunately for Australian fans, up to and including tonight, every time bands rolled through our great southern land they were relegated to support slots. Does this mean that the appeal of blackened death metal is not as great as this reporter has envisaged? No, no, no; it must be that the booking agents, venues and fans are all wrong, because Goatwhore absolutely kill shit up on the stage. Working through cuts off last year’s Constricting Rage Of The Merciless, Goatwhore sound like the perfect hellspawn of Venom and Morbid Angel. Over the tremolo-picked, double-kick madness of guitarist Sammy Duet and drummer Zack Simmons, the band can still craft cohesive songs like Baring Teeth For Revolt and FBS. Goddamn, it’s brutal excellence as Goatwhore command the pit to get nutty. And at least there’s some justice in the world, because vocalist Ben Falgoust tells the crowd to come back to Crowbar the next night for a Goatwhore headlining show.

But you can’t really begrudge Psycroptic headlining over the New Orleans act. In fact, you can’t begrudge them at all. For anything. These dudes bring that in-your-face immediacy of the best punk and hardcore shows to technical death metal, where usually the first two rows are windmilling maniacally and then everyone else just has their arms crossed wearing a vaguely bored expression on their face. Jason Peppiatt is jumping into the crowd, getting thrust perilously close to the beams on the ceiling. All this only serves to get the vocalist more revved up as he introduces the tracks off the band’s new self-titled record. A further refinement of the band’s attempt to marry jams with technicality that has continued on from the (Ob)Servant record, the self-titled album provides a hell of a lot of headbanging fodder. Tracks such as The World Discarded showcase how well Psycroptic’s music can activate the crowd. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the contented, yet profusely sweaty, faces of the punters streaming out of Crowbar tonight.