Enslaved/ Zyklon/ 1349
The Mean Fiddler, London, 12/9/06
By James Willcock
Firstly, before launching into this review proper, I have to address two points. Firstly, I missed the majority of the first band on stage for the evening, however for once it was not through any fault of my own. My flatmate and I left our flat at 7 (when doors opened), anticipating, based on previous experience, the journey would take 30 minutes and we would arrive roughly in time to meet someone else and see the first band take the stage. However, we didn’t arrive until a little after 8, as not only did two bus drivers ignore us waiting at stops, traffic in south west London was horrific due to the Chelsea home game, and when we tried to get the tube at Knightsbridge the Picadilly line was closed due to “passenger incident” at Green Park, which is the subtle way of saying someone topped themselves by jumping under a train.
When we had finally made our way into the venue, the first band was already on stage. Although this was supposed to be
1349, I had heard they’d pulled out and there was a different name on the timetable by the ticket office, but as I was late I have no idea who was actually on stage. Whoever they were, they played a distinctly melodic form of death, with relatively mid-range growling vocals akin to
Dominate- era
Morbid Angel. As I only got to see 2 or 3 songs I don’t feel fully qualified to give a full critique of their set, however they did come across as the standard opening support band - competent, but doing nothing particularly special, only serving the purpose of getting the fans acclimatised to the loud music in time for the later bands.
Anyway, next up were the real reason I wanted to go to this show -
Zyklon. Having been a fan of their brutally heavy yet riff-tastic hybrid of black and death metal for a couple of years now, I was looking forward to finally managing to catch them live. Starting with
’Subversive Faith’ from the new album,
Disintegrate,
Zyklon immediately set up their agenda for the evening- to pound the crowd’s eardrums into submission, based squarely on the legendary Trym Torson’s insane drumming. Even within the world of extreme metal, this guy is just ridiculously fast behind the drum kit, which I can also happily confirm was a proper man sized kit. I was most impressed with his level of technical ability, combined with his all out power, throughout the entire set.
The band continued, with
’Core Solution’ from
Aeon, followed in some order or another by
’In Hinsight’,
’Disintegrate’,
’Ways of the World’ and
’Underdog’ from the new album and
’Psyklon Aeon’ from the 2nd album. You may notice at this point the more than slight bias in songs, which was my only criticism of
Zyklon’s set. Although the new album is excellent, where is
’Hammer Revelation’,
’Chaos Deathcult’ or indeed anything else from
’World Ov Worms’? It was just unfortunate that
Zyklon were limited to only a 40 minute set and decided to plug the new material as much as possible, although they kept pauses between songs to a bare minimum in order to get as much played in the time they were given.
While on the note of the new material, I’m sure it will interest many of the readers on this forum to learn that, at least by the standards set by
some people out there,
Zyklon are now officially metalcore. This is based on the fact they are metal, with some hardcore influence, which seems to be enough for some people to lump a band into the metalcore genre. Don’t believe me? Not only is it present on the album version but the band seemed to positively revel in playing a breakdown, which forms the last minute or more of
’Ways of the World’. Not only does the riff slow down, the section is driven by a pounding rhythm and little melody, with one vocal line repeated over and over (pretty much the defining factors of a breakdown these days), but it’s preceded by a shout of “Let’s fucking go!”. I was a actually shocked when I first heard it, due to it being somewhat incongruous in a
Zyklon song, but there you have it. Perhaps though we should come up with yet another –core name for it, in order to differentiate it from other bands.
Blackcore perhaps?
Zycore? Or perhaps this just illustrates that people should stop worrying so much about whether a band has been influenced at all by hardcore. Who knows.
Anyway, back to the gig, and the headlining set of
Enslaved. I must admit, prior to a couple of days before the gig, I had heard precisely nothing by
Enslaved, so am not a great expert on their material. However, I was aware that the majority of songs came from the new album,
Ruun, with the title track from
Isa and one track a piece from
Monumension and
Eld. The bias in material, therefore, was definitely towards the newer, more progressive
Enslaved sound that they have been cultivating for several years now, with very little in the way of blast beats and a surprising number of straight up head banging moments (although moshing did start up a couple of times, it was unsurprisingly kept to a minimum during the entire evening, the most going on during
Zyklon, as one would expect). Even the song from
Eld was one of the more experimental tracks, rather than the bleaker, more straight forward black metal of their early days.
The band members, as would be expected, all played with consummate skill, and I award extra brownie points for the use of visuals in the background behind the band, basic as they may have been (close up on a pair of constantly moving eyes, moving shapes, etc.). The set lasted around an hour and a quarter, giving the fans plenty of material for their money.
Overall, I would say this was a highly enjoyable gig, even as someone not into Enslaved or black metal in general, let down slightly by a lack of time devoted to
Zyklon.
8/10
