DYING FETUS - European Tour 2014 - Review

This cold Thursday night offered a whole lot of variety and awesome music, featuring DYING FETUS plus 3 supporting acts, at the Backstage Halle on December 4th 2014 in Munich.

FALLUJAH:
The opeing act was FALLUJAH, based in sunny San Francisco. 25 minutes of brutal Tech-Death, presented in crazy songs twisted the minds of the audience. This was a downright impressive performance which even withstood major technical difficulties. The band was really professional, even about a mute lead microphone.
Still, not everybody can handle a band like FALLUJAH. This is highly technical music, definitely not to sway away to. These guys are not afraid of suddenly changing the whole theme of a song to throw in a dreamy, jazz-ish acoustic passage just to tear it down again in a heartbeat and bring total mayhem. It's hard to describe, experiencing it yourself is highly recommendable!

MALEVOLENCE:
MALEVOLENCE presented an intense change of pace and a wild mix of different music. They used elements of Hard- and Metalcore as well as Death Metal to perform some seriously ass-kicking songs in front of a (still) somewhat lazy audience.
They have some insanely awesome ideas but it's not always enough quite for a whole song. They nailed the live performance part but there's a whole lot of potential in their songwriting.
By the end of their set, they finally had the people waken up and there was lots of movement in the room. Job well done.

GOATWHORE:
And now for something completely different - yet again: GOATWHORE continued the theme of contrast and played solid, wonderful metal. This performance had the Black, the Heavy and the Rock 'n Roll, even. Additionally, the band earned sympathy for what was probably one of the shortest soundchecks in the history of live performances as well as a vocalist who obviously honors the efforts of the common Metal guitarist by making funny faces on stage.
This band was a whole lot of fun to watch and the performance was sweet but after three opening acts, the time was finally right for some reckless death.

DYING FETUS:
No intro, no gimmicks, one guitar-channel, not a single pedal and basically no interaction with the audience, only pure sonic hellfire - DYING FETUS finally took over the petite stage of the Halle. They opened their show with 'In The Trenches' from their latest album 'Reign Supreme' - it truly is Nomen est Omen with this one, by the way.
As expected, what followed was more than an hour of total destruction. There's hardly any other band out there that can pull such brutality with only three guys, like these folks from Maryland.
The second song was 'One shot, one kill', followed by some more songs from 'Reign Supreme' including 'From Womb to Waste'. Now this song is a masterpiece of modern death and it's also a pretty good indicator of what this band has to offer: Groove that basically forces you to move, complex and brutal riffing and high speed blastbeats that just melt off your face. It was almost ridiculous, how seemingly relaxed but still technically perfect this band performed this intense material live on stage.
The show ended with 'Your Treachary Will Die With You' and Trey Williams himself sold T-Shirts. DYING FETUS live, anytime again, please!

Text: Richard Metzler