LIVE IN VIETNAM: SUFFOCATION, GATECREEPER, BLOOD SERPENT, THANH DUC, DIARSIA, DISTRICT 105 — 27 MARCH 2024

(Our Hanoi-based correspondent Vizzah Harri prepared the following report of a hell of a show that took place in Ho Chi Minh City, aka Saigon, on March 27, 2024. Uncaptioned images in the article were made by him.)

The late eighties and early nineties must have been suffocating times – there were 6 bands formed around the same period with the name Suffocation. Though the band that formed in the same year that Soviet troops finally withdrew out of Afghanistan was the one that prevailed.

Suffocation needs no introduction for being groundbreakers in the genre of death regarding brutality and technicality. If anyone didn’t know, they’re from Long Island, home to the NYC boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, the former of which has some of the coolest metal bars any side of the Atlantic. I for one am really lucky to have not been born too late to witness Saint Vitus perform in the eponymous bar named after them.

Jesuit, if translated phonically, will sound like dễ sử in Vietnamese, which means ‘easy to use’ and the line followed unto the Latin of ‘lesous’ leads us to the catch 33 of salvation. These missionaries were extremely successful and had a massive influence on the eventual subjugation of the ‘J’ or ear-shaped French Indochina. An area that according to Wikipedia covered less ground than the three sovereign nations of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam of today.

Vietnam and Cambodia together are about 9 Long Islands smaller than France at 512,247 square kilometers (km2), which is about 20 Long Islands (3,629 km2) bigger than Arizona and the State of New York as one (436,554 km2). If you follow my bulletproof logic here… it’s been almost 20 years since Suffocation from Long Island visited this humid ‘little’ corner of the world.

Like most any other place in the world, Long Island is privy to some peculiar laws. You can’t operate a mechanical bull in Nassau County but you are allowed to get 30 days paid leave as an organ donor. In Suffolk County it is unlawful to perform live under another act’s name, but it certainly ain’t this reason for the Long Islanders to have been upgraded to the major sixth of bands named after the administration of a choke hold. Instead of throttling to death what others were doing in the genre, it was Suffocation’s prerogative to innovate, face change and stand their ground.

For a death metal show to be successful no matter how big the headliners, hardcore had to be brought to the table. It’s bigger than any other genre in South East Asia right now. Beatdown was either taken literally when the intensity ramped up with the heavier deathly tones of the last 4 bands, or the overload of down-tuned polysyllabic tremolo-picked and kaleidoscopic hyper-percussive riffs of the departed resulted in 3 people losing consciousness during the span of the night.

I ain’t never had bruises from any metal show I’ve been to, and my first international show was Sepultura’s Roorback tour in 2003 when they played Parow City Hall in South Africa. The naïve organizers there sold beer in bottles and wondered why it turned into a near riot when the band members started a fight, with the drummer literally throwing his bass drum at the bassist. Either Paulo was sick of the outro or it was part of the show. Bottles flew, it got messy. Not a fucking scratch. We can blame the instances of saturninity in Saigon on what can be described as a strumming deathmatch mesmerism.

 

Image by Kỳ Nguyễn

District 105

Formed at the end of 2017, this band has seen a bit more success with their brand of beatdown hardcore than their peers in the death and black scenes, having gone on tours to Bangkok, Singapore and even Taiwan in the past. Even if you were not a fan of hardcore, you might be won over by a live show with District 105 in it. When a band is having fun on stage, the crowd is sure to follow, and it certainly helps having a frontman with as much stage presence as District 105’s Huy. Passion gets beaten to death in reference to emerging scenes, think of it more of being pushed into a corner with nothing left to lose, that’s where the music comes from, and that’s what you get when submitting yourself to these reckless souls.

https://district105.bandcamp.com/album/seasons-in-decay
https://www.facebook.com/District105Official
https://www.instagram.com/district105official

 

Image by Iñaki Piérola Corral

Diarsia

This Saigonese act is one of the few that are trying something new instead of going along the same well-trodden path of many other bands. Bringing in more of a cinematic and at times even operatic sound to add layers to their music, it can be loosely derived back to their name. Diarsia is a type of moth from the Noctuidae family, controversial for its classification morphing constantly. This band are therefore living their definition by keeping things fresh, and even though they do subscribe to deathcore, they are more of a hybrid, crossbreeding sounds and ideas from a multitude of influences.

Image by Tyler Henthorn

https://www.facebook.com/diarsiadeathcoresg
https://www.instagram.com/diarsia_band/

 

Thánh Dực

This band berserking in the nether regions of Vietnam brought the show into deathened territory with some standout and downright classy riffs. The Vietnamese language is one of the toughest ones to translate using online tools. When I attempted doing so, this band’s name, which looks like some historical saint’s name, popped up as just that; Saint Duc. I wasn’t satisfied though; some more searching lead me to a story of an army that defeated the rampaging Mongols, and that Thánh Dực is actually closer in meaning to Divine Wings.

An army based on the recruitment of the unwanted, delinquent, and discarded, they were massively successful in protecting the royal court and their country. Formed in 2019, Thánh Dực might not literally have taken flight during their live set, but they certainly did not embody the Japanese interpretation of divinely winging their own suicidal destruction – ala Kamikaze – there was however quite a bit of bolt-throwing happening. The night took a plunge six feet under as these wooden chemise donning* Saigonese denizens shifted gears towards something of a marriage between captivating headbanging riffs with the themes of Sabatonic historic glory.

*wooden chemise donning: from ‘mặc chemise gỗ’ – an old slang phrase for death

https://www.facebook.com/thanhduc.deathmetal
https://www.instagram.com/thanhduc_deathmetal/
https://soundcloud.com/thanhduc-musichttps://open.spotify.com/artist/4ZAhR6w9DAwu4FPl7Rzqlv

 

Blood Serpent

You need a good sound engineer to get the sound right at a metal show, even more so when you don’t have a drummer yet still want to play live and go for a drum track. Is it weird seeing a band playing in front of an empty drum set? Certainly, but did it matter? Look, I’ve more than alluded a few times to the lack of drummers in Nam. Innovation is key and Blood Serpent did really well considering the fact that they were essentially a three piece of charnelled strings, coruscating vox and expert programming.

 

If Thánh Dực precipitated the sounds of death, Blood Serpent amped it up into blackened-death glory. Giving the crowd an abbreviated version of their album Bestial Extermination, Blood Serpent annihilated preconceived notions of what’s possible for a live act and completed the initiation ritual for the headlining thaumaturges. With songs like their opener Death Invocation channeling Dagonic levels of murky thrashed-up riff-mastery akin to Nefarious Dismal Orations-era Inquisition. Even the drums remind one of Incubus’ style. These Hanoians did not need anyone to be asleep to enchant with their devastating compositions.

 

https://www.facebook.com/bloodserpentofficial
https://www.instagram.com/bloodserpent.bestial/
https://open.spotify.com/artist/2AMpEkJ8dB6toVAxDsEQup
Limited Edition Bestial Extermination CD via Iron Bonehead

 

Image by Mateu Lambda

Gatecreeper

In Vietnam, this time of year approaching summer and graduation coincides with the blooming of the Royal Poinciana, the phoenix flower. Gatecreeper hails from Phoenix, Arizona. This is a band that saw there wasn’t enough of a buzz (/s for sarcasm) going in the ashes of the wake of Blood Serpent’s conflagratory performance, and then summarily amped it back up to boss level opulence.

There might be a large amount of metal fans that go to shows, especially of the death variety, who might not be musicians or listeners that really care about the sound that is produced. More often than not you get a faction of the crowd that just go cos it is loud music and death-metal speaks to the cathartic release and sometimes expression of negative emotions. The sound at Havana was exceptionally handled. Sound is number one; some venues don’t care about it; Havana did care cos there was a dedicated soundman who worked with each band to make sure levels were right.

Image by Mateu Lambda

Groovy as all hell, one could easily be mistaken for thinking they hail from a Floridian gator-infested swamp. When a new sound is experimented with and seeps into the mass-consciousness of aural acceptance, it soon is either played to expiration, massively reproduced unto dilution, or further experimentation occurs. It’s not that Gatecreeper takes the sound of Swedish death per se that much further, or dabbles in that much experimentation, it’s that they know their strengths and have a goddamn ear for what needs to be amplified. What they get right, even and especially in their live shows, is texture. I’m not talking about layers, rather levels.

Image by Mateu Lambda

Gatecreeper played a few tracks from their new album Dark Superstition. Where The Black Curtain is more of an anthemic creeper up on your consciousness willing to ignore how buzzy that saw hit, Caught In The Treads takes mid-paced glory to a different sort of anthem, that which bows in the very vestments of the sacrament of terminus.

https://www.facebook.com/gatecreeper
https://www.instagram.com/gatecreeper/
https://gatecreeper.com/
https://open.spotify.com/artist/0eCB2pwtPnLywA4rxe4i4N

 

Suffocation

With songs from their, dare I say, neutron stellar new album like Perpetual Deception, listeners could have been deceived into thinking that bands with such a long history might fall into traps of perpetuity in self-cannibalism. One listen to Hymns of the Apocrypha later and any such fears of reverting back to the dark ages would be waylaid, other than the ever-presence of (avoiding the nigh-innominate and also nearly hapax legomenon-territory NCS word of) pulverize thesaurized, in present-continuous form.

Image by Mateu Lambda

The album never got an outright review here as far as my fledgling researching skills could find. Andy Synn did however mention in his 2023 in review: The Great albums that he was blown away by the new Suffocation album and that it proves that “these old dogs not only have some new tricks up their sleeves but that their bite is still even stronger than their bark.”

Much more bark could be carved in support of said composition and when considering its homonym, Ricky Myers more than did justice to his endorsement by Frank Mullen to take over vocals and hype man duties. Stepping in to fill the shoes of a frontman that set the bar for a whole genre couldn’t have been more daunting, but in this case, the chop of death was that of approval.

Image by Mateu Lambda

So, it’s been a while since Suffocation made it to Asian shores (18 years, 11 months, and 16 days), at least that’s what I got from the concert archives site (though fan-run, it is less well-known in Asia), which is not exactly accurate seeing as Gatecreeper are not even listed as having performed in Saigon on the 27th of March this year. Anyone having been present at 142 Tran Nao Street would contradict this.

Yes, it is more than a month that has gone by, but as the saying goes, good things do come to those who wait. With each new album fans ravingly suffer the catering of a new rendition of one of the songs from the cult-status Breeding the Spawn. 2024’s effort is no different in rewarding the ignorance depraved, though the title track of that much-loved album was played in their live shows for this tour. So, did the United States of Americans deliver? Jesus wept for the mass obliteration that ensued.

Image by Mateu Lambda

https://open.spotify.com/artist/4ItRDIouodpnW6nm4TYDk1
https://soundcloud.com/suffocation-official
https://www.facebook.com/suffocation
https://www.suffocationofficial.com/https://www.instagram.com/suffocationofficial/