When I ended up covering the Deathstars gig last minute for a fellow contributor, I genuinely didn’t know what to expect from the industrial metal Swedes. Despite having listened to them for year’s id never caught a show as I considered myself more of a black metal fan. I’d also heard that Deathstars were a notoriously sexual band live so having never seen them before, I expected to be foiled – or fooled.
But, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Openers Liv Sin who also hail from Sweden and are led by Liv Jagrell who instantly won over the metal hearts of the crowd with a string of livewire anthems. All the power and respect goes out to female vocalists who can lead with such ferocity and it was a pleasant surprise that the countless London and further afield accolades who had gathered upon Scala’s smaller venue, agreed with me on this one.
Next up were Priest, and these Scandinavians were more to my liking! Not only because of the Terminator masks, though that was certainly novel to me as far as live costumes go! But the Cryo-esque aggrotech and dark electro mix they concocted for us that fateful evening was pleasing at the least, titillating at the median, and lewdly keytar-tastic at its best. Hey, Slimelight – these leather daddy Blade Runner Terminators absolutely have to be on your hit list to book. You know, asking for a friend.
And then it was time for the men in black – who were donning fetish gear to claim the stage. Is it insulting to say that I didn’t expect Swedish people to be quite so sexual? I had never seen quite so much live crotch thrusting in my entire gig-going life, and even then, it was impossible to predict it being quite so uncannily not at all cringe! An entirely too unpredictable culmination.
Sexual innuendos aside (though with difficulty), Deathstars were genuinely one of the best live bands I had ever bared witness to and are most definitely the best in their particular genre. They were such a well-oiled blitzkrieg machine both visually and musically, in their interactions with each other, and in their interactions with the public. The journalist in me was astounded. The photographer in me felt like a voyeur at a super-secret occult ritual. The fan in me is still unspeakably giddy.
Review and Photos by The Flâneur
