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Horrendous

Jul 31, 2024 By Matthew Berlyant Photography by Matthew Berlyant Web Exclusive

The last time Toronto death metal heroes Tomb Mold came through town back in April, they had just played Decibel Magazine’s yearly Metal and Beer festival and their set had been the talk of many who were there, with one punter even calling their set “mind-melting.” A few months later and at the very end of a month-long tour with Philly death metal stalwarts Horrendous (incidentally playing Decibel’s twentieth-anniversary party next month), Tomb Mind came back to the venerable Brooklyn Monarch and proceeded to melt our collective minds as well. A Tomb Mold show is immensely enjoyable for death metal aficionados, but in an all-consuming way, almost smothering, and with everything set to eleven, most notably insanely gifted guitarists Payson Power and Derrick Vella playing like death metal’s answer to Robert Fripp circa Starless and Bible Black, but doubled. When you add a singing drummer Max Klebanoff in the tradition of Stewart Copeland, Grant Hart, Don Henley, Karen Carpenter, and others (though none of them performed death grunts; haha) and new bassist Kevin Sia deftly keeping up with it all, you are in for a powerful set.

The set, as expected, focused heavily on last year’s The Enduring Spirit, their acclaimed fourth album that was longlisted for The Polaris Prize, opening with “Will of Whispers” and heading straight into “Fate’s Tangled Thread,” which they named the tour after. Fittingly, the set closed with the epic “The Enduring Spirit of Calamity,” the last song on The Enduring Spirit and perhaps an indicator of where they will go next, with even more twisting, turning, progressive passages that at times even hint at late ‘70s jazz fusion and early ‘80s new wave. It’s not for nothing that The Police’s “King of Pain” was played as part of the soundtrack between bands and right before their set.

Of the three older tunes they played in the seven-songs set, the highlight was “The Final Struggle of Selves” (from 2018’s Manor of Infinite Forms) unexpectedly sung by “Dance Floor” Justin DeTore (of too many bands to list here). And now that the touring cycle for The Enduring Spirit is done, I find myself eagerly awaiting the next step of their evolution and journey and I am far from the only one, as evidenced by the packed, excited, sweaty crowd hanging on every note.

Openers Horrendous were also terrific, in their way just as technical-minded (but not in an overbearing way) as the headliners, but utterly different, if just as heavy and almost as intense (which is really saying something). Both on record and live, they display a prominent funk-metal influence enabled by bassist (and stage diver during Tomb Mold’s set) Alex Kulick, whose playing occasionally reminds me of Death Angel’s Dennis Pepa, particularly on 1990’s Act III. Therefore, both in terms of sound and in terms of their energy, they just radiate “fun” all the while dazzling the crowd with compositions from their most-recent full-length Ontological Mysterium (which can be described on occasion as not dissimilar to Tomas Lindberg fronting ‘90s Death) and their previous records as well (including 2014’s second album Ecdysis, which they’re playing at next month’s twentieth-anniversary party for Decibel magazine).