immortal: live in brooklyn

It was early in their set at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple Tuesday night, and Abbath Doom Occulta, guitarist and primary vocalist for the Norwegian black metal band Immortal, was feeling charitable. “If any of you wandered in here and are wondering who the fuck we are,” he growled, “we are Immortal, the Sons of Northern Darkness!”

The scenario he described — that someone would have somehow stumbled upon an out-of-the-way Masonic temple, paid the $45 cover charge and then been confused by the band they discovered on stage — was ludicrous. But, in a way, it gets to the heart of what Immortal does best: leavening breakneck, bloodshot, pit-of-hell metal with just a dash of ridiculousness. The group, along with Mayhem and Emperor, were at the forefront of the early ’90s Norwegian black metal movement, an uprising that left in its wake a long trail of burned churches and dead bodies. That they self-identify as the ‘Sons of Northern Darkness’ is telling: where many of their black metal peers continue explore themes that are situated decidedly south of heaven, Immortal are a proud product of their environment. In Immortal songs, the apocalypse comes not as a result of a grand Satanic uprising, but as the result of natural disasters summoned by an overtaxed earth.

Indeed, their show often felt very much like that apocalypse. Immortal play fast and brutal music, and the guitars often sounded more like a cloud of hornets than actual instruments. Opening with the title track from their blistering and underrated new album All Shall Fall, the group delivered a harrowing set comprised mainly of violent, blitzkreig riffing. Though black metal is not typically a genre that prizes innovation (after one particularly furious number Abbath boasted, “That was new shit, but it sounds like old shit to me”), Immortal have figured out ways to nudge the genre forward ever so slightly: Abbath occasionally broke free of the chordal clusterbombing to peel of long, loopy solos, and he varied the tone and pitch of his growling in ways that approximated actual singing. During “Pure Holocaust,” the group turned their guitars into jackhammers, spitting out a series of impossibly compact and angry chords. “Battles in the North” was another grinding nightmare, Abbath mostly barking his lyrics as the guitars corkscrewed nastily behind him. This, of course, is the thrill of metal shows: pure visceral experience, endless thrills piled one atop the other, the sonic equivalent of an out-of-control rollercoaster.

And lurking behind it all was just the vaguest whiff of camp. Midway through the show, Abbath strode out to the center of the stage and employed exaggerated hand gestures to regulate the volume of the audience’s cheers. It’s a time-tested and utterly cliche concert technique and, for a brief moment, it seemed to close the gap between the show at the Masonic Temple and, say, a Bon Jovi concert.

If Bon Jovi wore corpsepaint and chainmail and sang about the apocalypse, that is.