Sadness Is Delicious

UNHOLY CONCERT ENDS AT UNHOLY HOUR: WATAIN

Last night, I went to see Swedish black meddlers Watain perform at B.B. King's along with the (mighty!) Nachtmystium and the (underwhelming) Angelcorpse. Doors were at 10 pm and Watain didn't finish until shortly before 3 am. All in all it was a pretty amazing show, although Watain chose not to use their trademark mix of real cow/goat/pig's blood and throw it into the audience. And here I changed my shirt for nothing! Related: I saw a fan come up to Blake from Nachtmystium after the show and made some comment about how he had come to the wrong show, and Blake was like, "What do you mean? We almost didn't get paid last night!" (referring to a show where the headliner had used the blood.)

Nachtmystium had a new band at the show, which included Goatwhore drummer Zack Simmons and Nile bassist Tony Laureano. They sounded incredible. It was easily the best time I'd seen them. Blake's taking more leads live now, and it's sounding even more like Instinct: Decay (still my favorite metal album of 2006!).

I didn't take any pictures of Angelcorpse, mostly because they didn't move me. Their death metal was too drum-heavy and had too many solos. Their singer/bassist also performs with the Canadian black metal band Revenge, which I like a lot, but his voice seemed overpowering for death metal in a live setting. He used his voice during the song breaks too, which lead me and my friends to joke about what it would be like for Angelcorpse to go to the DMV... "I WAS BLINKING WHEN YOU TOOK THAT PHOTO. TAKE IT AGAIN!" or "IS THIS THE RENEWAL LINE? I CAN'T BELIEVE MY LICENSE WAS REVOKED!" Would love to see that.

Watain was as alwesome as you would expect them to be, even without the blood. They mostly focused on music from their latest album, Sworn To The Dark, which musically seems like the next logical step from Dissection. The guitars were crisp and the band was able to whip the crowd into a frenzy. Everything vocalist/bassist Erik Danielsson has said in interviews about how his audience becomes possessed is true. Also, I want to point out that as the night went on, I noticed more orbs (those weird, fuzzy, white circular things) and other metaphysical phenomena creeping into my photographs. It seems they were literally summoning this stuff. I've never witnessed anything like that before. Maybe that's just what happens when you name yourself after a Von song. I recently did an interview with Watain for CMJ and Danielsson said a lot of interesting things. Maybe I'll post the whole thing here after it prints. If you can see 'em, do it!