Music review: Among cannibals and dragons at Pulp Summer Slam 13

My mantra for tonight is: I will not join the pit. 

 

The circle pit is a young man’s game, and I last stepped into the maelstrom of black clad people bent on trying to kill each other at the Amoranto Stadium in 2010, when Lamb of God and Testament headlined this stage. 

 

That time we were mostly on stage left, as close to the barricades as possible. Then again that was three years ago when I was doing much field work and gigging almost weekly.

Tonight, it’s a few years later and I’ve mostly been sitting on my bum at work or at home, nine hours a day for months on end. Physical fortitude, I must admit, is at an ebb.  

 

Which is to say, I’m smack dab in the middle of a sweltering April 27, at the annual Pulp Summer Slam heavy music festival, this installment titled “'Til Death Do Us Part.” Which is to say it’s 5 p.m., and the black shirts now number in the tens of thousands. Amoranto Stadium is filled to the brim, just like it usually is for this event. 

Funded and produced by Pulp Live World Productions, Inc. this year's festival featured seven foreign bands headlined by metalcore group As I Lay Dying and death metal giants Cannibal Corpse. 

 

Other foreign groups included A Skylit Drive, Circa Survive, Dragonforce, Amoral, and the popular prog rock outfit Coheed and Cambria. Pinoy pride was represented by Chicosci, Philia, Mr Bones and the Boneyard Circus, and local rock’s misfit pranksters Kamikazee (who were slotted, weirdly enough, at 12 midnight, after the main act).

 

See you at the Slam

 

If you’ve never experienced a festival atmosphere then this is the closest you’ll ever get. Pinoys haven’t been introduced to the tent or vehicle-pitching culture of Western festivals yet, and the States may have Coachella, Sasquatch!, Burning Man and Lollapalooza, and Germany may have the holy grail of metal fests in Wacken Open Air, but we still have Summer Slam. Thirteen years running and literally growing bigger each year. 

 

I remember a sound bite from Rob Zombie where he opined that metal is “so big and yet a lot of people don’t seem to even know it exists.” Go to Amoranto during the Slam and see this statement at once disproved and illustrated. 

 

This is for the misfits, the tattooed, the disenfranchised, and the full of angst. Here, today, we are legion.

 

I came here, like most of the thirtysomething metalheads did, to see Dragonforce and Cannibal Corpse. The latter’s been a fixture of death metal since the 1990s. The former is a more recent one, having released albums in the noughties, but their sound is so reminiscent of classic power metal that it brings back the glory days of Dio and Rainbow.  

 

It was with regret that I skipped the local acts that came on from 12 noon to around 4 p.m. This wasn’t out of snobbishness, mind, but simply to avoid the scorching heat and the possible stroke that a temperature of 36 degrees Celsius could induce in an aging metalhead like me. 

 

Kudos though to the local acts. I caught some online footage that looked like everyone was having fun as the rain came down out of nowhere and bathed the crowd, steam rising off them like a herd of black-skinned animals.    

 

Yeah, there was some donwpour in the afternoon so by the time we arrived at 5 p.m. the air was a tad cooler. Bad news: the ground was moist and had been churned up by the thousands of boots trampling over it. You can’t win them all.

Here there be dragons

 

Dragonforce are a British band and were formed in 1999. Though it’s clearly an inside joke, they call their sound “Nintendo metal,” and like all jokes are half-meant; there’s a grain of truth in it, but the facts upon a closer listen add depth to this claim. 

 

Certainly, they’re known for very technical and very fast guitar work, the long and swift solos, the addition of power metal genre staples like fantasy-based lyrics about heroes and triumph over evil, soaring, operatic vocals, furious blast beats, and an obsession with an inspirational, uplifting attack that all add up to a very stimulating sound. Add some keyboards and a few electronic sounds and you get what the retro videogame reference is for.  

 

Their set at the festival was a demonstration of physical agility and near flawless guitar acrobatics. Jumping around while playing some of the fastest, most technical riffs is almost like a superpower. 

 

Guitarists Herman Li and Sam Totman are the only two remaining founding members in the group since ZP Theart's departure, but the songs on the new 2011 LP “The Power Within” certainly cut down some on indulgent, ultra-long solos and brought back the sounds of their early records, especially with tracks like the single “Cry Thunder.”

 

At the media conference a day earlier, Herman Li confessed that they still looked at their instruments with the hunger for discovery: “Yeah, there are still goals for us in terms of conquering our instruments. We still basically practice a lot on guitar work and still learning a lot. You can’t just stop and say that I’ve learned all I can because there’s always something more to learn! In a way every member of Dragonforce is always honing his skill. This is so we can all work together better and put on better stage shows. . .In our previous albums we just played as fast as we could so we’re trying to put more dimensions on that that’s not just relying on if you can play this with as much technical ability that you have.”

 

Likewise Marc Hudson (the new vocalist who did his audition through YouTube a la Journey’s Arnel Pineda) executed the high notes and falsettos like a 21st century castrati on hits like “Operation Ground and Pound,” “Heroes of Our Time” and the majestic “Through the Fire and Flames.”

 

Finland’s Amoral was also of interest for their speed and thrash approach, and Coheed and Cambria came on with their space meets prog aesthetic right after Dragonforce’s aural blast. I also found there was much to relate to in A Skylit Drive’s post-hardcore screaming. 

 

They feast on our flesh

 

I can also understand the drive to melody but, barring a few heavier bands in the movement, metalcore for me is mostly a head scratching experience. Which doesn’t mean that As I Lay Dying wasn’t any good. On the contrary, the kids looked like they were having some pretty ferocious fun. Never mind the generation gap, that’s all that matters.   

 

But today is for dragons and cannibals. It’s 11 p.m., which means Cannibal Corpse. 

 

I came to Cannibal Corpse’s discography early, through 1992’s “Tomb of the Mutilated,” and was blown away by the brutal coarseness of it. A tad frightened, actually, with the level of testosterone and something in the music with the hankering, the powerful desire to do harm. Something that was, I would later discover, apparently a hallmark of the whole sub-genre.

 

That George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher and co. proved influential was no surprise. That they’re still making a cacophony to this day (with the release of a new LP, “Torture”) is proof of how sticking to your guns can lead to longevity. 

 

And controversy and backlash from media and, oh, just about every concerned parent and citizen group in the EU. After all, all Cannibal Corpse albums have been banned upon release from being sold or displayed in Germany, and a select few are also prohibited from release or sale in other European countries as well. 

 

Not bad for a band that has never had any significant radio or television exposure, but have still made it to become THE top-selling death metal band of all time in the US by the time their fourth album was out.

 

Death metal is arguably the scariest of the sub-genres. It’s certainly one of the more extreme ones that come with distinct images of mutilation and anatomical perversion. 

 

While Black Metal has its trappings of Satanism in spiky boots and white face paint, Thrash owes kinship to Punk, and Stoner Metal is closer to, well, rock ‘n’ roll and dope culture, Death celebrates the many ways that humans can be transformed, tortured, possessed, and augmented. 

 

Trust your black shirt

 

CC’s sound—with members hailing from the suburbs of Buffalo, New York—is all those 80s horror movies and classic horror fiction funnelled into one unholy mash. 

 

Death Metal IS body horror. Its fascination with how flesh can be manipulated means its album covers and liner art also come with visions of disease, dismemberment, horrific birth, self-immolation, surgical agony, and all kinds of torment. I could go on and on, but you get the picture.   

 

When CC opened with “Demented Agression”, the black-shirted whirlpool stirred itself into action, that temporary return via violence of movement to the old days standing near the shaman’s fire, howling at the moon, petitioning gods with sacrifice. A mosh pit is primalism in action, raw and unfettered.

 

By the time “A Skull Full of Maggots” and “Evisceration Plague” came on I was wishing I could survive another go at the explosive tsunami of approximately 30,000 headbangers. I repeat my mantra and simply enjoy the aural bath and intensity of “Hammer Smashed Face”, a road sign of dark transcendence, showing the way to exorcism on the Via Noctis of metal. — BM/KG, GMA News