Last Sunday, Vancouver’s The Pearl saw dreadful forces collide: local slam metal act Luella, funeral doom bringers Primitive Man, and metal-grinders Napalm Death, brought together by angst and sonic disorder.
I closely followed who else Napalm Death and Primitive Man shared the stage with in Canada, and found it especially charming that it was Luella in Vancouver. Their energy is big and kind, and that night’s company somehow summoned their true colors for all to see. Their opening, straightforward and familiar, made everyone comfortable so that Primitive Man could trample that comfort down. And from that moment on, the chilling contrast established itself there, on stage.
However, all bands provoked something similar at the same time.
Unlike many metal concerts, this had nothing barbaric, animalistic in it. On the contrary, Luella’s vocalist, Scott Whalen, proclaiming “We’re all family” from the stage in the beginning, the almost Poughkeepsie Tapes–slideshow by Primitive Man in the middle, broadcasting something familiar too, but the worst of it, and humanism-soaked speeches by Barney Greenway made it all about thinking, thinking, thinking, and being present at this concert as a human part of the very broken dehumanized world. No space to dissolve. Yet, a space to share, and be healthily angry together.
There were no signs that the first two bands were warming up the altar for Napalm Death. They played together – yes. But Napalm Death brought everything up to temperature on their own, while Primitive Man left the stage rather cold and ravaged. With the energy the British possess, it happened extremely fast, and the youngest breathed quite heavily until Napalm Death let everyone go. Barney Greenway was serious in his mind, and flexible with his body, jumping here and there, until his black suspenders popped off! He not only moved between stage divers, who were given free rein, but also between the band’s eras, switching from “You Suffer” to “Narcissus,” and to “Contagion,” and then back to their punk-ish time. Their sound was as diverse as you’d expect, justifying the phrase from their website: “…there is still no band on Earth that sounds like Napalm Death.”