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Concert reviews Music

Behemoth and Cannibal Corpse at the Phoenix

BEHEMOTH and CANNIBAL CORPSE at the Phoenix, Tuesday, February 24. Rating: NNNN 


People who don’t like metal: why? Why don’t you like metal? Are you afraid of loud noises? Do you get spooked easily? Do you jolt awake in the night when your hypoallergenic cat knocks your copy of Yo La Tengo’s I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One off the shelf and it lands on your faux-laminate hardwood with a dainty clatter?

Metal is, factually, the best music. Watching Poland’s Behemoth – one of the most inventive, entertaining, soul-shattering contemporary metal acts and legit Satanists all – it’s impossible to understand how anyone wouldn’t like it, how anyone could hear it (or see their lavishly appointed stage show) and wrinkle their noses like mom trying sushi for the first time, going, “Ooh, not for me.” 

Behemoth’s blackened death metal has expanded over the past 25 years to enfold pretty much every type of metal. They rip flawlessly through howling solos, chugging rhythms and Latin invocations to Lucifer. Cloaked and corpse-painted at the Phoenix, they opened with Ora Pro Nobis Lucifer from last year’s incredible The Satanist. Then they tore through a back catalogue of mostly recent-vintage bangers, like Conquer All, Slaves Shall Serve and Ov Fire And The Void. 

After departing with the upbeat farewell, “We love you all! Hail Satan!” they returned for a show-stopping encore, summoning up The Satanist’s epic closer, O Father O Satan O Sun! Before they launched into its spoken word breakdown – invoking “all the creatures of the firmament and of the ether” to “whirl the wheel,” as good an excuse to start an old-school circle pit as any – the stage lights went ominously dark. When they came up, the band was decked out in matching horned helmets. It was like something out of a Kenneth Anger movie.

Criminally, Behemoth were opening for big-name Buffalo death metal act Cannibal Corpse, which is kind of like double-billing The Godfather Part II with Fight Club. It may be uncharitable to say that Cannibal Corpse sucks. Maybe their music – flat, boring, macho in a scowling, thick-necked way yet spiked by juvenile lyrics about dismemberment, putrefaction and corpse rape – just isn’t attuned to my palate. Maybe there’s something there, though – at least for the packed house of fans in Cannibal Corpse, Deicide and Agoraphobic Nosebleed T-shirts shove-moshing to the group’s grinding assault.

There’s just no accounting for taste. One person’s Behemoth is another’s Cannibal Corpse is another’s Yo La Tengo, and so on. So for now I’ll just narrow my eyes contemptuously, wrinkle my nose and mutter, “Not for me.”

music@nowtoronto.com | @nowtoronto

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