(Our contributor Vizzah Harri lives and works in Vietnam but is a native of South Africa, and on a recent return there he caught a great show in Cape Town featuring the bands named above. He sent us the following lively report, adorned by photos courtesy of Laura McCullagh and Slam Dank Productions.)
June 2022, intermittent light beams get blasted from the Oort cloud. 2 lightyears from Earth. In June this year the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) in Sutherland receives a message from outer space. Weirdly enough, instead of the technosignatures and quantum communication techniques that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has prepared for, it was in morse code:
Lucien Rudaux – Sur les Autres Mondes (defiled by adding morse digitally)
It immediately got sent to the SAAO headquarters in the suburb of… Observatory, Cape Town. Once deciphered it baffled astronomers the world over:
“A call to all serfs of the riff and seers of depravation that unless they wish their very marbles to be vanquished, only one task lays before them: consume the ancients afore the 7th day of the 7th month.”
Upon further investigation it was speculated that this was a message from asteroid-inhabiting exogorths, space slugs to be sure. Aliens with a whack sense of numerologist humor seeing as the 7th of July would be 77 years since the much-debunked Roswell incident. By the 5th of July it was nearly too late to appease the cosmic mollusks until the forward-thinking crew of Slam Dank Productions set up a ritual for the ages.
In a year that is proving to be jampacked with tours, stellar releases and debuts, we can also count ourselves fortunate to be in a universe where tech-death stalwarts Defeated Sanity are still spreading their jazz-infused melodies of expiration in their Final Impetus Tour. South Africans had the opportunity to see them in two locations in early July of this year.
On my trip home to renew border traversing documents, I was lucky enough to attend the first show on their mid-year world tour at The Armchair Theatre in Observatory, Cape Town. Supporting acts were the hilariously named Eat the Elderly, the metallic hardcore act Peasant, and another Capetonian household name in The Fallen Prophets. What follows is a bout by bout show review of what transpired on the night of July 5th 2024.
Eat the Elderly are new kids on the block as a recording entity, however the two offerings they have online so far sound anything but from the inexperienced. From their social media we can glean proclamations of their unleashing sonic chaos to appease their slug overlord with a call to worship at the altar of their cosmic conqueror.
Their mission is to administer a new take on space metal. A kind of melodic death with brutal overtones and electronics divined by a cosmonaut. This three-piece consisting of Theo Durand on vox, Cameron Zuccarelli on drums, and Dylan Souter on headless 8-string guitar duties rate themselves as slugcore, which if one were to take a shallow dive into the encyclopedia of all things anti-core-metal, their nearest aural and thematic reference would be Slugdge.
With not much of an idea of what to expect upon entering The Armchair, concertgoers were more than pleasantly surprised to find that a band consisting of a demented octopus, a snarling rabid boar mixed with a Strogg Berserker, and a human electric groove machine were here to warn us of outer space slugs of death. Lyrics to one of their new songs, Militia, can be found online:
“They have come
galactic scum
Their will be done
Slithering slugs
Don’t give a fuck
Their reign’s begun
Making us their slaves”
And one spin of the two tracks available for streaming so far might just convince any casual listener that these celestial gastropod proselytes are out for world domination. Their performance was electrifying, and my friends and I wondered if the lineup could have been correct seeing as this sounded more like a band ready to headline their own tour.
https://www.instagram.com/eattheelderly/
Peasant were up next. And here I need to make it clear that for one ignorant to what the South African metal scene has to offer: comparisons can be petty, subjective, and idiotic outside of wanting to place groups in transparent shifting boxes to appease our patternicity; the order of the bands did not fucking matter in the end.
Any of the three local mini orchestras could fill a goddamn stadium with the amount of heft, musicianship, and stage presence each of them offered. Hardcore gets a lot of hate; hell, I think I’ve made it quite clear in other writeups what I think of hardcore style mosh pits. In order to not fall into the trap of using ableism, it is to my pun-intended mind a form of defeated… lucidity. The Slam Dank show was extremely well organized though, and safe; even the security guys took part in the mosh pit.
When hardcore works, it’s punchy, groove-tastic, and catchier than organized superstition in the desperate. Peasant made no small threat to converge all the above mentioned into an incendiary refusal to have dreams snuffed out by bad brains. Flying a black flag burst proudly from the icy winter cold.
The fact that they just returned from a European tour is not surprising given what they’re capable of on stage and in studio. Peasant are Graham Pitout on drums, Keagan Van Rooyen on bass, Pieter Jordaan and Immanuel Bester on guitars, and Adri Jordaan on vox. Give them a listen below:
https://www.instagram.com/peasant.hc/
https://peasant.bandcamp.com/track/pendulum-soul
The Fallen Prophets need no introduction to African ears; they don’t even need an introduction to NCS acolytes across the world seeing as Andy Synn featured their 2023 album in his ‘A year in review(s) – The Good’.
Perpetual Damnation starts off with a whisper, nary a whimper, of acoustic picking, but the calm does not last long before Let the weak suffer goes into full category 6 obliteration mode. Their drummer is a ballistic human metronome accompanied by string acrobats with no ideations of holding back on the shred on even the first track, and a vocalist alchemized in a lab where stem cells from Tom Waits-, Randy Blythe-. and Frank Mullen’s vocal cords were made to fester.
The Fallen Prophets’ set served as a reminder that for many of us lovers of extreme music, melody still reigns supreme. At times thrashy with slam-inflected and throbbing down-tuned tremolos, these veterans of the scene never deviate from their end goal of administering a deviant crowd shuffle, or demon stomp.
With their mix of old school rigor mortis-inducing, hardened core, and crusted brutality-infused base of melo-death, it was even hard for agoraphobic paralysis-suffering individuals to keep still. If you’d like to test your ability to not move a muscle, see how long you can last with this stream of Perpetual Damnation:
The Fallen Prophets are:
Pieter Pieterse on vox, Francois van der Merwe on guitars and backing vox, Dylan Haupt on drums, Marc Olwage on bass, and Daniel Louw on lead guitar.
https://www.facebook.com/the.fallen.prophets.band/
Defeated Sanity have been around for quite some time and the NCS core probably saw them at Maryland Deathfest this year amongst a veritable legion of other class acts. South Africa, just like Vietnam where I live, is that geographical anomaly which is really fucking far from everywhere else. It isn’t easy to get bigger acts to come down here. It was therefore a massive pleasure to find that they made Cape Town the first stop on their summer tour schedule.
Phytodigestion is the first track off The Sanguinary Impetus and also how Defeated Sanity opened their set. The drums slowly building into a masterful display of mind-bending syncopated technicality, understanding of tension and severity shrouding an undercurrent of ever-present groove (recurring theme much?). There are many bands that arguably have a better sound in a live setting than of what can be heard on their studio releases. The Sanguinary Impetus was mixed and mastered by none other than Colin Proliferative.Industrious.Meticulous.Prodigy. Marston. It doesn’t get much better than that. So, better, is a relative term.
Whether you’re into the more brutal forms of metal or not, experiencing Defeated Sanity is something of an otherworldly experience, especially in a smaller interior venue with supreme sound. Let’s just say that July 5th was one of the best shows I’ve been to as far as consistency and quality of sound was concerned. Just like any gig there were a few small technical mishaps, but they were quickly fixed by the amazing team working with the artists.
The uninitiated might wonder how lyrics are even vocalized with the style that Josh Welshman brings to the table, yet hearing it live one understands why a band with a jazz background chose the more brutal end of the spectrum in metal. It’s so much fun when you have four insanely talented artists on stage who each have equal space in the mix and play off each other so well.
Professional as they are, they nearly didn’t skip a beat into the encore that almost felt like it arrived too quickly. It didn’t, the crowd just had so much boisterous merriment that the sands just seemed to evaporate. Lille Gruber and crew treated us to some new material interspersed with their more mature tracks and it’s safe to say that in a time where it is becoming more and more difficult to not be stagnant, to innovate and to stand out, from what was on offer it sounds like the new record is gonna rip.
Defeated Sanity are:
Lille Gruber – drums, Jacob Schmidt – bass, Josh Welshman – vox, and Vaughn Stoffey – guitars.
https://www.instagram.com/defeated_sanity_official/
https://www.facebook.com/DefeatedSanity
Defeated Sanity are still bound for Asian shores and you can catch them live on the following dates:
All photos courtesy of Laura McCullagh
Sound: Jethro
Lighting: Nicolas Strydom