Some shows define an era, and the assault of Sammath on Texas revealed where underground metal is going now: doubling down on what made it great, injecting new creativity, and fleeing from the dual pitfalls of three-chord nonsense and elaborate “progressive” stylings.

The Houston show of this two-date worldwide Texas tour ignited in the Black Magic Social Club, a bar styled after the outsider watering holes of the Montrose in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They charge reasonable rates for drinks, elaborately and morbidly decorated, and are unabashed fans of dark music. A backdrop of skulls made of sound-absorbing foam lines the wall behind the stage, and the bar itself has been designed to absorb noise with softer paint and fabrics on the walls. Portraits of Aleister Crowley and Anton Lavey hang on the wall, as do bits of metal memorabilia and necrotic illustrations in runes, sigils, and esoteric symbols. During the cooler winter months, the outside smoking area is hopping, and although the bathrooms periodically flood the club with tapwater, they are clean like a modern bar, as is the seating area. Drinks range from $5 up and feature a number of craft beers and imported beers as well as — hold onto your hat — a wine list. The dive bar has experienced a Satanic upgrade!

Haserot took the stage first with their set of later-style death metal, which means a lot of surging rhythms where drums, vocals, and stringed instruments hammer out the same pattern. It was catchy like later Kreator, aggressive like Exhorder, intricate like the final era of Death, and the band spent a lot of time varying up song structure. The good: instrumentally, this band is near the top of the stack, below Morbid Angel but above your average, and their show was completely professional and high energy. The bad: vocals lead these compositions like in most later-style death metal, and the band members seem to be playing as if in different bands, so songs sort of collapse in a jumble of contradictory impulses. It was good to see these guys for the first time and their set was impressively complete.

Sacrocurse slammed out a set of their music which sounds like a hybrid of old Sodom and Nausea with Massacre riffing in the middle, keeping high energy throughout and utilizing a fast strum that made this music move like waves in the midst of depth charging. Instrumentally, the band were quite good, with the drummer leading and guitar/bass providing a dominant voice while explosive gut-wrenching vocals gave each song form. The good: for that feeling of simple songs capturing an era, this band evoked a sense of the old school sound and attitude. The bad: the songs were written with a similar approach and like grindcore, presented what they had and then hammered it into repetition before a sudden ending. Having never heard Sacrocurse, many in this crowd appreciated how much this band stayed within tradition and churned up a dark and morbid mood.

Trenchant presented the most complete set, with atmospheric intros before each song and a carefully choreographed stage performance in martial clothing and matching Ironbird instruments. The drummer attacked the set with extreme but precise violence, capturing the sound of the drumbeats of war in an age of uncertainty, and both guitarists demonstrated precision playing, with vocalist/guitarist NRS commanding an intense performance with vocals matched to intricate but not formless leads. The music falls somewhere along the lines of martial industrial like Lycia but with early technical death metal guitars, and although the band is war metal, they approach that genre with an atmosphere more like that of doom metal, with touches of black metal in ambience and vocals that verge on RAC/Oi at times. The good: this band delivers an impeccable performance, exacting instrumentals, and a no-nonsense style of songwriting that eliminates the chaos and superfluity in order to state exactly what it means. The bad: like Grand Belial’s Key or martial industrial, Trenchant focuses on establishing a mood and circling around it for some depth, but then concludes without any transformative motion in the song. They will probably work on that next album. It would be difficult not to be awed and somewhat subdued by this performance where all the parts come together to transport the listener from a moribund era into one where order prevails over the neurosis of mortals.

Sammath approached this event like a streetfight, taking to the stage without any more introduction than the backing tracks of WW2 combat that were used on their most recent album, and launched into an ultrafast tremolo attack of songs from throughout their catalogue, bringing new life to the older ones with a stripped-down assault. Hearing the range of their work played in the same way with the same sound brought out the consistency of the vision behind this band and also showed how many voices they have found to express that over the years. Older songs, with the keyboards gone, fit right into the newer work as if a grimoire of war and the human conflict between idealism and reality behind it were being written before our eyes, with what looked like a few hundred riffs fitting together into songs that in turn fit together with each other for an experience of transcending the surface pretenses of society and looking into the atavistic nature of survival. These songs are designed like the old European towns to be naturalistic, meaning that they resemble patterns we encounter in daily life or in the growth of our souls as we accept reality for what it is and turn toward it with aggression in order to master it, and nothing stands out as extraneous or needlessly repetitive. If we are lucky, at some point they will make a live album of sets like these, since this performance left no doubt of their mastery of the domain of metal that without being political or social, speaks to the need for a hard confrontation with reality and the discovery of a desire to ascend within that framework of patterns.

The good thing about a show like this, in addition to the intense performances led by Sammath and Trenchant, is that when it is done, there is almost nothing to say. The fans stagger out into the cool night with heads full of riffs interlocking to portray experiences that challenge our everyday beliefs about reality, the bands pack up and leave, and the hive-like warmth of normal human activity takes over and adulterates the moments of clarity achieved onstage. Sated, challenged, and pummeled into submission, the listeners board their cars and drive home in stunned silence. For a few hours, in the darkest expressions of humanity, we found the best of humanity and a hope that our stupefacted species might someday grow up into beings capable of crossing the void of our fear of emptiness and embracing fate in all of its wild, snarling, and terrifying forms.

Tags: Black Metal, death metal, haserot, houston, sacrocurse, sammath, trenchant, War Metal