The record release celebration for Vomitum Tempestas, a collection of songs featuring drummer Ruben Elizondo pieced together after his untimely death, showed Houston death metal band Imprecation in its most refined and vicious form.
Necro Blade performed a tight set of material influenced by Morbosidad, Sarcofago, Covenant, and Under a Funeral Moon, slashing out a solid grouping of frenetic songs which tended to build toward a clash of themes resolved in manic violence.
Mephitic Corpse followed with their hybrid of deathcore and classic Carcass style grindcore, gurgling and churning through pounding chromatic riffs that avoid pretenses of harmony in order to drag us into a subterranean immersion of colliding walls of sound.
Imprecation — reconstituted with half of the lineup of Trenchant as well as ex-Blaspherian drummer Matt Hefner and Adumus shredder Milton Luna — took to the stage under the vocal guidance of original member David Herrera, who was also responsible for much of their Luciferian branding, and delivered a guttural invocation of dark forces to match.
The band nailed a precise set while rolling with the vicissitudes of live production in a small club, with guitarist NRS capturing the amorphous yet exacting nature of guitar solos that heavily involve tremolo and bends to sculpt ethereal echoes into harmonic guidance.
Unlike most bands of their era, Imprecation understood how to space out their intensely rhythmic riffs with harmonic distance and set up triplicate themes to build evolution over the course of each song, creating a sensation of deepening experience.
Delivered live, these anthems to blasphemy, heresy, and apostasy against the easy answers of Christ and human self-worship seared the ears of those present and suspended disbelief in the power of death metal as the mood intensified. When they finished in the depths of night, the decidely sinister atmosphere followed the dispersing fans into the humid concrete deathstar of the Houston landscape.
Tags: death metal, imprecation, mephitic corpse, necro blade
