Another year older and ornerior, but my birthday night-out on Tuesday left me feeling anything but the latter for a few hours, thanks to the enigmatic and prolific German metal maestro Noise bringing Kanonenfieber, his World War I–themed blackened-death project, to the Big Smoke. After listening to The Urkatastrophe, the impressive recently released sophomore album for which the tour is named, I pretty much had to grab a ticket.
Support for this campaign came from Panzerfaust, a Canadian black metal outfit with their own impressive discography (and hearing that they were part of the Freedom Convoy against the tyrannical Trudeau administration made me like ’em even more). They played only five songs on this set, but seeing how the average Panzerfaust song is shy of ten minutes, it added up to an album’s worth of material. With their unusual stage set-up—drummer Alex Kartashov front and center, flanked by guitarist–vocalist Brock Van Dijk and bassist Tom Gervais, and dedicated vocalist Goliath platformed at the back—and cast in an obscuring combo of light and shadow, they thundered through their specially selected setlist consisting of songs from all four of their Suns of Perdition series of albums, including two from the newly released fourth installment. The epic ‘The Hesychasm Unchained’, the especially melodic ‘The Far Bank at the River Styx’, and ‘Promethean Fire’, with Goliath’s bellows therein reminding me of a latter-day Jaz Coleman. Fantastic set, and it was nice speaking to the band at the merch stand afterwards. Hope they return for a headline show.
In contrast to their support, the Kanonenfieber troupe made their masked selves otherwise visible to the audience, all the better for the show, which featured Noise and his Waffenbrüder going through several costume shifts and re-enactments over the course of their 80-minute set. Soundwise, everything sounded stellar. Unlike quite a number of recently attended gigs that had issues with vocals being submerged beneath instrumentals, both the latter *and* Noise sounded loud, crisp, and clear, ensuring the impressive visual spectacle didn’t overshadow the aural centrepiece. Standout moments in a sterling set included Noise firing a gas gun into the audience during ‘Der Fusilier’, the transfixing intensity of ‘Grabenlieder’, the industrial stylings of ‘Kampf und Sturm’, the cameraderie during the excellent ‘Waffenbrüder’, and Noise donning his deathmask for closing song ‘Ausblutungsschlacht’.
~MRDA~
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