Inferno Festival Day 2, April 2nd 2015
Photos by Eivind Nakken.
Still nursing a gently throbbing headache from the night before, an impressive crowd is already gathering at Rockefeller as the clock strikes six in the afternoon. The honor of inaugurating the main festival stage has fallen upon Oslo locals Execration. Their brick-shittingly heavy death metal earned them a Norwegian grammy in 2014, and evidently their accomplishment have not gone unnoticed. With a sound that could grind mountains into dust, they get the tired audience moving with skillful abandon. The dual vocals of guitarists Jørgen and Chris range from brutal to downright hellish, and the musicianship is spine-tingling. It’s an incredibly tight performance, filled with twists and turns, representing a ruthless awakening for everyone in attendance.
Leaving Rockefeller behind for a few hours, our next stop for the evening is of the avant-garde variety. Playing at the café/art gallery Kulturhuset, the oddballs in Virus perform in front of a curtain made from old magazines. With the original line-up together again for the first time since 2010, they dig into their back-catalogue, making room for a couple of cuts from their debut Carheart and debuting songs from their upcoming album. Through an eclectic mix of funky bass, jazzy riffs, and weird atmospheres, frontman Czral and his boys are obviously having a great time on stage. Their energy is infectious, and the sweaty jam-packed venue boils with unbridled satisfaction.
As the crew removes the makeshift curtains, the small Kulturhuset-stage is transformed into a surrealistic cityscape as taken out of German expressionist cinema. The props decorating the stage are the work of Costin Chioreanu, a Romanian artist who has made a name for himself by painting a number of excellent album covers in the last few years. Tonight he is collaborating with the Norwegian avant-metallers Vulture Industries, resulting in an audiovisual piece titled The Babylon Spiral. This one-off concept entails combining the raw intensity of a Vulture Industries-concert with theatrical props and antics, in the most literal sense of the word.
Dressed in white shirts and black suspenders, the band appears a gentlemanly bunch. This illusion of sophistication is shattered by frontman Bjørnar Nilsen’s erratic and powerful performance, giving a portrayal of a man possessed. Raving around the stage like a charismatic lunatic, he belts out tracks such as “The Hound” and “The Bolted Door” while crawling on the floor, climbing on the stage, and raving amongst the audience. Meanwhile, Chioreanu paints vague figures from behind the scenes, and makes appearances disguised as a number of characters. Absurd and brilliant, it’s safe to say that The Babylon Spiral is a spectacular show that we are unlikely to forget.
Leaving the insanity behind for a while, we return to a completely crammed Rockefeller in the hopes of getting a glimpse of today’s headliners – the Polish juggernauts Behemoth. Since the festival is completely sold out, the crowd is numbering around 1500 people, pushing the venue’s capacity to its limits. It is past midnight when Nergal takes the stage to thundering applause, demonstrating that demolishing Oslo is no challenge to a man who’s conquered both cancer and the Polish religious elite. Besides the finely-tuned display of immense death metal, the band is pulling out all the stops for this gig, with enough pyrotechnics to roast a herd of elephants.
Launching into the monumental “Blow Your Trumpets Gabriel”, Behemoth are a well-oiled machine on an carefully crafted warpath. With a performance that includes costume-changes, posing on carefully placed platforms, and multiple rotations of stage-props, this is as much about the showmanship as the music. That being said, Behemoth are an exceptionally tight live band, and with a treasure-trove of deadly cuts it’s no wonder that the audience is going berserk. Nobody can say that Behemoth don’t give their fans their money’s worth, and consequently Nergal and company can write this up as another triumph.
After Behemoth disappear back into the shadows, most festivalgoers are either busy filling up the city’s metal pubs or invading the festival hotel’s various nachspiels. Being soldiers, however, we head to the small venue Revolver to check out Doomraiser, true Italian purveyors doom metal. Despite playing at half past two in the night, the band proceeds to knock the figurative socks off those in attendance. Channeling the likes of Candlemass and Cathedral, the leather-clad Italians represent old school metal of the purest form. A somewhat odd fit on a lineup concentrated on death and black metal, Doomraiser prove that you don’t need blastbeats to make great metal. Finishing up a short half-hour before the pubs begin closing, we head home bearing epic doom hymns and shit-eating grins.
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