Obscura are a band that have experienced a fair share of controversies and lineup changes over the years but each individual lineup has had immense technical proficiency and skill as they’re led by a fairly divisive figure in death metal: Steffen Kummerer. All this is just background that is quickly forgotten once you’ve witnessed just how impressive an Obscura set can be. Gorod and Skeletal Remains joined this show in Manchester.
First up was Gorod, a band that had toured with Obscura back in 2012 on the Omnivium tour, I know this because it’s a tour I’ve always regretted missing when it came through Manchester. After years of build-up, I finally experienced Gorod and they perfectly met my expectations. Unsurprisingly, the instrumentalists are highly skilled and despite having a guitarist missing, they still created a gigantic sound that would be almost impossible to imitate without years of practice.
The opening track, ‘Bekhten’s Curse,’ contains impressive complex tapping passages performed while the guitarist’s eyes are closed. Every instrumentalist was at the peak of their abilities and picked up the slack while their other guitarist was absent and they played a set of flawless jazz-inspired death metal in the same vein as Cynic and Atheist complete with monstrous vocals and insane blast beats. It took me nearly 15 years to finally see this band live, and it was worth the wait.
Next up was Skeletal Remains and this was less of a display of technical skill and more of a bludgeoning. The lights went down as the band entered the stage and they never went back up which was difficult to get past, especially considering the mosh pits were starting to ramp up.
Skeletal Remains are a stellar example of “modern old school death metal”, their music is a blending of grinding Morbid Angel riffs, Cannibal Corpse style bludgeoning drumming and the surgical precision of Carcass. All these influences make Skeletal Remains stand out in the lineup but their appearance helped add some much needed variety to a pure tech death lineup.
Skeletal Remains may not have been especially animated on stage due to the complexity of their music and the minimal lighting but the audience more than made up for that. Their set was a non-stop flurry of violence aided by blast beats on vicious grinding tracks like ‘Relentless Appetite’ and ‘To Conquer the Devout’. Mosh pits aren’t a common occurrence at tech death shows so this set definitely injected some energy in between the technical wizardry and as an added benefit; there was no kung fu in the pit, it’s a death metal show after all.
Finally, Obscura made their way to stage and began their Sonication, which is the aggravation of particles through the use of sound according to Wikipedia. The set began with ‘Forsaken,’ a sprawling epic that shows that this new lineup is up to the task of filling the shoes of some of the giants that have been a part of Obscura’s legendary history.
The majority of the set was made up of tracks from the last two records, A Valediction and A Sonication, the newer tracks are played amazingly by this brand new lineup and that really helped ease what could have been an awkward transition considering Obscura last played in Manchester with a completely different lineup just over a year earlier. Valediction tracks included the borderline power metal epic, ‘Stars Collide,’ and the blunt force of ‘A Valediction’ which contained some of the smoothest fretless bass passages of the evening from bassist Robin Zielhorst.
The tracks from ‘A Sonication’ are more atmospheric but they still fit the Obscura ethos very well and translate to a live setting really well. A vocal group weren’t impressed with the second single, ‘Evenfall,’ but it has much more energy live and fits the theme of the set considering it’s a part of what will eventually become a trilogy of albums. Tracks like ‘Silver Linings’ may not be as complex as older Obscura tracks but they still have the same grandeur in the form of the big ethereal outros and harmonised guitar work.
An Obscura guitarist is faced with one gigantic task when joining the band, ‘Akroasis’. This track will go down in history as one of the greatest death metal guitar solos of all time and will act as a litmus test for tech-death guitarists in the same way that ‘Tornado of Souls’ has for thrash guitarists. Kevin Olasz performs this section brilliantly and even adds his own little inflexions much like former guitarist, Christian Muenzner did at the last show in Manchester. There’s really only one man who can play this exactly how it was written and that speaks to how good of a guitarist Tom Goldshlager is.
The rest of the set was still full of Obscura classics like the atmospheric tapping riff-laden ‘Emergent Evolution’ and the monstrous mosh pit inspiring tech death assault of ‘Anticosmic Overload’ which shows drummer, James Stewart, at the height of his abilities as he blasts everyone in the audience just as hard as the C02 cannons by the stage. It would have been nice to have balanced the new material with the old better but it’s still nice to hear tracks that were absent at the Decapitated show. The show could only end up with one song: ‘Septuagint,’ a 7-minute-long behemoth of a track that towers above so many others in the genre. ‘Omnivium’ is as close as we’ll ever get to a new Necrophagist album and for that, we have to give thanks to Obscura for one of the best technical death metal albums ever released.
Obscura has been an important band in my life so it’s hard to accept that it’s a constantly changing and imperfect entity but you can take solace in knowing that Steffen will always find the right people for the job. Like a death metal Dave Mustaine, he understands his own strengths and weaknesses and will always strive to find the best musicians he can, even if it’s just for a little while. If you’re not convinced by A Sonication then you should go see the live show, you will not be disappointed.
