In concert in Paris, Death Angel brings a storm to the Petit Bain

2023-11-03 05:38:42

Storm warning this Wednesday, November 1st in Paris. In addition to Ciaran starting to blow hard, at Petit Bain, the barge moored on the Seine, it’s a tornado of thrash that roars over the crowd filling the room. Thrash, this music invented in the early 1980s, which mixes the energy of metal with that of punk, as it was practiced in its early days by Metallica, sent three of its worthy representatives this evening, currently in the middle of a tour European. The Californian veterans of Death Angel are accompanied by their no less experienced compatriots from Sacred Reich, for a double headliner, with the Spaniards of Angelus Apatrida to open the ball.

For reasons beyond our control, we are unfortunately missing the performance of the first two purveyors of decibels. But it is only to better understand the furious madness of the Angel of Death, determined to give no quarter.

The two bosses in the lead, guitarist and main composer Rob Cavestany, with his fingers as fast as ever, and singer Mark Osegueda, who doesn’t hold back, to say the least. Mention “worker of the evening” also goes to drummer Will Carroll, survivor of two Covids, the first of which failed to send him into the other world, who maintains a superluminal rhythm behind his kit almost constantly.

Unleashed slammers

Because the group did not select its bluettes for the occasion. He attacks hard from the start with the seminal “Thrashers”, followed by the equally frantic “Voracious Souls”. Half of this Wednesday’s repertoire, served with a sound as energetic as it is clear, comes from the group’s first three albums, delivered at the end of the last century before a break of around fifteen years. And it’s good to hear the powerful “3rd Floor” or “Seemingly Endless Time”.

But the opuses released since the reformation are also used, and the very poetic “The Dream Calls for Blood”, “I Came for Blood”, or even “Buried Alive” literally make the slammers amok (those spectators who are carried by the crowd to get to the stage), which parade without interruption and cause a lot of trouble for the security guys.

Osegueda regularly brushes the audience in the wrong direction, recalling that France is a land of revolutions before the aptly named “Relentless Revolution”, repeatedly thanking the spectators for coming, and confiding: “We love playing the music for people who love music”! At least it’s a change from the usual “you’re the best audience on the tour”…

Such a concert can only end, without an encore, with an atomic title, and it is indeed the nasty riff of “Thrown to the Wolves”, followed by a sonic execution in due form at 250 km /h, which ends the evening.