Show Report: Atheist/Abysmal Dawn/Blistering Rot/Exitosus/Kumsumption (2) @ 1720, 1/3/2025
Welcome to 2025. I smell like beer
First, an appeal
I am sure you’re aware of the Los Angeles fires. As you know from these show reports, LA is my home away from home. My best friends are there. I have a job there (I’ll go back into the office one day, Matthew). I’ve spent more time there than anywhere that isn’t my town.
So, anyone who lives in LA or is in LA frequently knows someone who has had their lives changed due to this fire. A good chunk of the school an ex-coworker works at burned. Artists and musicians I see regularly lost their homes. And friends and acquaintances had to evacuate.
The appeal, then, is this: If you're currently supporting or have any plans to support Wolf’s Week or Plague Rages, I'd prefer you donate that money to one of the many groups involved with helping people recover from the fire. You can find a list here. Among other organizations, I've been donating a lot to the Pasadena Humane Society, which is providing pet-related wildfire relief for the Eaton Canyon fire. If you’d like to donate to orgs that help musicians, you can go to Sweet Relief among many others. There are also a number of Gofundmes where you can help people directly.
If you're in the greater LA area, you can find places to volunteer or give in-person donations in the MALAN link above. Please read the notes to see if the organization is still accepting donations or what donations they are accepting. If you're not in the greater LA area, I can't stress this enough, consider volunteering in your community. I donate time and items to a number of local groups. I increasingly think community is the only way forward these days.
I'm going to take a break from show reports for obvious reasons. I have one more report in the can, but that can wait.
If you have the means, please help. Thanks.
***
I was showered in beer again. Not in a fun way, like I just won the pennant, but in an annoying way, like an adult version of surprise Golden Shower Double Dare. As the first sentence implies, it's not my first Duff dunking, either. Nerp. The ol' suds soaking happened so frequently last year that I stopped mentioning it. At least once a month, there it was, running down my hoodie and/or pants, ensuring a slow drive back home because I didn't want to get pulled over and explain that, while I haven't had a drink in 15 years, yes, I do smell like beer.
Not to keep harping on this because you absolutely do not care, but I don't get why the beer bath has to happen. I don't! Either I am so intimidatingly hot that people lose all motor functions around me, or no one understands how to hold a cup at a concert in 2025. Evidence of the latter is the play-by-play of this bout. The offending brewski came flying at me after an over-eager hesher was hip-tossed out of the pit, hitting who I found out later was his brother, dislodging the cup from his brother's hand because he was holding it like you would a quail you just shot, and sending the Sea World Spalsh Zone-size slosh of beer squarely at my shoulder. I took the brunt of the damage. I smelled like Hefeweizen or some other fruit-stank beer for the rest of the night.
2025, you have officially christened me. Any hope this year might be different went right out the window. The world turns; I wear beer. Amen. No universal order has been upset. I am still a magnet for concert liquids of all sorts, which is precisely why I'll never see Gwar.
Anyway, wow, what a night...not in a good way. This show, in the parlance of Millennial Smirk, was not it. No fault to the musicians, but booking the same general death metal for a five-band bill…was rough. That meant three hours of Death iterations, Abysmal Dawn's Suffo-lite-ness, and Kelly Shaefer and his young guns playing, count them, 19 Atheist songs. Post-beer barrage, it was a real test of endurance. This will also be a real test of me trying very hard to not be overly mean in this report.
LA's Kumsumption — yes, that's its name — needs more time in the garage. The ideas are there: What if early Sepultura but Scream Bloody Gore, but the execution needs work. I don't know why this comparison makes sense to me, but it's like a drunk Morbid Visions texting everyone in its contacts at 2am. Still, Kumsumption is pulling it together. The last time I saw the band was in a local bar, and I believe it was a duo. It has since expanded to a quartet. Naturally, this filled out its sound, but the same sloppiness is present. Obviously, there's the potential for some magically shitty charm in that sloppiness if the band can find its own voice. Right now, it's a little too derivative of its source material without sounding much like it, which is a rough spot to be in. Growing pains. Keep doing it, dudes.
When Exitosus took the stage, it was like, Oh, OK, here's a professional band. While still dropping a bucket to the depths of the 'what if Death but' well that is nearly bone dry, Exitosus, for lack of a better phrase, had its shit together. It was kind of like parking a BMW next to a DIY VW Bus. Everything was on point, calibrated for efficiency, or at least Exitosus benefited from being the second band off the pine. The only thing that was a little shaky was the vocals, but they'll come in time. Otherwise, the band was solid and the best you could hope for out of an early card local opener. Was I into it? Not really, but I get, like, three of these promos a day and generally don't reach past Death and Pestilence anyway.
Next up, Blistering Rot, which was kind of like early Bloodbath playing Scream Bloody Gore. That looks much cooler on the page than how it actually sounds. Blistering Rot, like Exitosus, is competent but not that interesting to me, which is a knock I have against most OSDM of the moment. We're going to go on a tangent because I'm not sure how to wring a paragraph out of Blistering Rot's set. As I previously hinted at, I think part of my general apathy toward OSDM, and this subsection of it in particular, is that I've been blogging for over 20 years. Blogger Brain is a real thing. It makes you irrationally hate anything "normal" because it feels like those are the only bands that exist in the promo deluge. On the flipside, you'll irrationally like stuff that is clearly blogger bait because it isn't "normal." If you ever wonder why critical darlings are usually slightly weird bands with atypical backstories, there you go. It all comes down to promo fatigue, and I wish I could hear Blistering Rot with fresh ears.
Same goes for Abysmal Dawn, even though it plays a different strain of death metal. As stated above, it's kind of like a cross between a Suffo-lite and an Immotation. Of course, the sound wasn't helping. Set-up and mic check was a struggle. The members eventually relented and made do with a crackle from the drum mics and lived with the defective bass drop triggers that lasted for minutes instead of seconds. That made their more exacting technical music sound messy, which I'm sure they weren't pleased about. The delay also made this show run way long, which I sure wasn't pleased about. But, yeah, not enough of Abysmal Dawn's material sounded unique or interesting enough to merit my undivided attention, and the crowd participation parts were frankly embarrassing. I got more out of the non-participating crowd parting and leaving me with an unobstructed view of the mosh pit.
I'll never understand pit culture. Its ways are alien to me. Within the pit were three giants grandstanding about supposed gladiatorial glory while doing nothing more than sloppy blocking drills. I swear one of these dudes did the "too small" celebration when he launched some kid out of the ring. Yeah, dude. No shit. Now, did I laugh when someone pancaked on the concrete so hard it sounded like a fishmonger slapping a freshly caught salmon down? Yes. I am only human. But more and more, I think there needs to be a designated zone for pits at the back of the hall. Moshing precisely where the sound is good is...well, enough of that shit. There are better ways to expend your aggression, like writing passive aggressive show reports on Substack. So, it's time for the rest of us to rise up and wall of death these folks, grind them under the boot of utilitarianism, and make them submit to non-mosh rule. That's not ironic at all. I don't know what you're talking about.
Whether the younger folks in the crowd knew who Atheist is/was is up for debate. I get the feeling that a lot of them came out because they recognized the name, and it was a death metal show on a Friday. Honestly, that's probably a better place to be. For us older, decrepit metalheads, it was like, Oh, hey, there's Kelly Shaefer fronting a band so young that none of the members were born when Piece of Time was released. Thus, while Atheist Reloaded was pretty tight, it still felt like a cover band playing Atheist songs. At worst, maybe one of those last-gasp county fair bands that have one or two OGs staving off the zombie band infection.
So, while "Atheist" played well, it just didn't have the spark. It felt...clinical and a little too School of Rock. On the plus side, we got "Room With a View," which Atheist hasn't played live since, supposedly, 1991. On the downside, since this was technically a warm-up show for a worldwide run, the setlist ballooned to 19 songs, which was heavy on Jupiter material, the 2010 comeback album that consensus says...is...uh...an album. At some point, all of the rapid-fire time changes of Atheist's better material just washed over me, and I zoned out, mentally popping back whenever something incongruous (a dedication to...Michael Keene...of the Faceless? Hope you didn't burn the Velvet Unicorn, bud) or brain-fog-piercingly incredible happened ("Piece of Time" with the "YYZ" ending). And that was sort of it. The only thing that really stuck with me that night was, of course, the sticky beer that was all over me.
***
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Glad you had fun!!
community indeed is the only way forward.