Devil's Gate Music
Related Articles
Originally formed around the question: ‘What if American slaves had embraced Satan instead of Jesus’, Swiss avant-garde metal group Zeal & Ardor fuse black metal with blues and slave music creating something completely one of a kind.
I’ve been eager to see Zeal & Ardor live for a while now and was concerned the show wouldn’t go ahead due to somebody within the Z&A camp contracting covid. Luckily everything is due to go ahead smoothly. By the time I arrive, there is already a long queue forming for tonight’s bands, and I am placed at the front of the queue to collect my pass which means I am in the door first. The Barrowland Ballroom is dimly lit and somewhat eerie when it’s this empty, a sight not often seen.
Brian Eno’s ‘Music for Airports’ fills the air as the mob starts to fill the ballroom floor. It’s quiet and peaceful. A simple drone and soft piano mixes with the chatter of the crowd. It’s a pleasant way to start the evening which promises to be a full-on sonic assault.
Lining the stage and draped in robes, Zeal & Ardor kick things off in fine satanic fashion with ‘Church Burns’. Frontman Manuel Gagneux flanked by backing singers Dennis Wagner and Marc Obrist belt out their slave-styled chant in a fevered passionate performance. When the band kicks in it’s a thick wall of deep bass and pounding drums. The machine gun blasting riffs of ‘Gotterdamnrung’ follow and the pit is well and truly opened up. Sure it’s a mosh pit but it may as well be Hell. Gagneux’s soulful vocals are replaced by shredded howls and he sounds more terrifying than any black metal vocalist screaming into a forest. His ability to switch from soulful crooning to satanic screaming is a wonder and he demonstrates it ably through the course of the band’s hour-long set.
Drenched in red lights for the most part, the colours are kept to a minimum of red, white, and black save for one blink and you’ll miss it; rainbow, the band no doubt showing their respect for the LGBTQ+ community.
‘Blood In The River’ sees Manuel beating the neck of his guitar like a drum adding extra intensity to the song. Speaking only a couple of times to the crowd whilst swigging from a bottle of Buckfast, he delights in telling the crowd he learned a new phrase today ‘Alrite Bawbags!’ He seems in a jovial mood but prefers to get on with the music rather than spend time idly chatting onstage. The crowd responds with a now-standard chant of ‘Here we fuckin’ go’. Rounding things off with ‘Baphomet’, Gagneux adopting the pose of the satanic goat-like figure, when he isn’t playing his guitar, seems like the perfect way to end the show.
It’s truly refreshing to see a strong black frontman in a genre that is so typically white, Ganguex seems confident and powerful delivering his satanic sermons over a backdrop of blues riffs and nuclear metallic chaos and he seems to have left an indelible mark on tonight’s crowd.
Hail Satan.
Not many bands could follow that, but then again, Meshuggah are not just any band. With the plaudits received from critics and fans alike for the new album ‘Immutable’ still ringing in their ears, it was time for the Swedish extreme-metallers to get back to doing what they do best: totally destroying a live audience.
The house lights fade and the stage is cloaked in darkness, the noise from the sold-out crowd begins to build, and then all hell breaks loose as the stage explodes to life with a wall of noise, and intense red and yellow stage lights burn the retinas of all that gaze upon them. The slow, heavy percussive intro to ‘Immutable’ opening track ‘Broken Cog’ sounds out and builds in the same atmospheric way that it does on the album, but a thousand-fold heavier though. Once the guitar mid-section lands, the strobes kick in and 1900 necks are bobbing as one. What a sight to behold. As gig-openers go, it is quite low-key, and only offers up the slightest hint of the brutality to follow. The groove of ‘Light the Shortening Fuse’ quickly follows on and the pits begin to open up; although thanks to the searing heat from the red lights, “the pits of hell” might be a better description. No time to catch a breath as it’s time to turn back the clock to 2002 for the guitar-bending punch to the guts that is ‘Rational Gaze’, and after marveling at just how good Jens Kidman’s growling vocals are, the thought of “Will the Royal Albert Hall still be standing after this lot batter it?” enters the subconscious.
The drum-fuelled insanity of ‘The Hurt That Finds You First’ has a deluge of crowd surfers going over the barriers, and sparks memories of the bad old days in venues such as the Manchester Apollo, where they had a “three-strikes and out” policy, meaning every time you went over the barrier you would get a line marked on your arm by a Sharpie-wielding bouncer and the third time you came over, you were out the side door into the Manchester night. Thankfully, times and attitudes have changed and bouncers up and down the country deal with crowd surfers a lot better now, which is just as well because the ‘Barras team of bouncers on the barriers are certainly earning their crust tonight. As is Meshuggah drummer Tomas Haake who constantly reminds everyone why he is so highly regarded as one of the most influential drummers in modern metal, his technical ability, and work rate throughout the night are at times staggering. Set highlights? New track ‘The Abysmal Eye’ has quickly become a firm favourite, and it sounds colossal live, but the cream of the crop that rises to the top will always be ‘Demiurge’ and the sheer carnage that comes with it. Superb. Meshuggah are kinda untouchable right now, catch them when you get a chance. Start training for it now though, as this is not for the faint-hearted.
Zeal & Ardor review – Colin Plumb
Meshuggah review – Oli
Zeal & Ardor photo credit – Matthias Willi
