Valkyrian Music

Bult + Massive Audio Nerve
Belsepub Henriksberg, Gothenburg (SE)
22nd June 2013

When I arrived in Gothenburg that morning it seemed I had hit a ghost town – most locals had gone to the countryside to celebrate Midsommar and stayed there for the weekend. But there were still enough metalheads to put up a nice crowd at Henriksberg and help Massive Audio Nerve celebrating the release of their 4th album “Cancer Vulgaris” (hence the name of the event, “Midsummer Vulgaris”, as you’ve probably figured out).

After The End Of Grace were forced to withdraw their presence, Bult stepped in with their “progressive metal”. In quotes because that’s how they label themselves, although if you’d asked me, I’d say they play death metal with a bit of groove to it. Or maybe it was just the fierceness with which the band performed that masked all the intricate structures of prog and made it sound rawer and more straight-forward. Whatever the case, it was a heavy performance that seemed to please the crowd – there was no mosh, but the applause and screaming that grew stronger through the show proved that. They kicked off with a couple of recent songs (“The Merciless Zero Of Indifference” and “Shattered”) and went on with the oldies – “The Denial”, “Overtly Powerless” and “Not Human”. A short set, but cool enough.

https://www.facebook.com/Bultband

“Cancer Vulgaris” will be officially released on July 12th, via Dead End Exit Records, but the guys decided to make a kind of live listening party. “Kind of” because they didn’t play the whole album, but almost. 9 out of the 12 songs were performed and warmly welcomed by the crowd, who now was much closer to the stage and more enthusiastic. And finally there was some action, even though the mosh circle was formed some four songs before the end of the show. “Cryosync”, “Grace Of Time”, “This Generation” (which I found myself screaming along the chorus) or “Underhanded Brother” are just some of the songs whose live potential proved to be high.

It was the first time that I was seeing this band, but I knew a few songs (I admit it, just the most popular ones on YouTube). In those songs, singer Tony J.J. goes from harsh to clean tones naturally and that night I could prove that it’s not a studio trick, as he does so live as well. Great voice indeed, as their music in general also is – an industrial metal that’s much more than that, and maybe that’s why they prefer to call it “48 Fret Metal” (given the full scale new system of notes they apparently created).

After the aforementioned 9 new songs, they played an encore of classics: “My Own Sickness”, “Logocide” and “Blood Vanish”. Still that wasn’t enough for the fans, who didn’t stop shouting “En låt till!” until the four musicians picked up their instruments again. And even though they had a lot of great songs of their own to play, they decided that last “one more song” should be Pantera’s cover “I’m Broken”. Needless to say it was a hell of an awesome choice.

https://www.facebook.com/massiveaudionerve

Text & photos by Renata “Pieni” Lino

This entry was posted on 25th June 2013 at 7:26 pm and is filed under Gig, Live. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.