Maryland, California and Quebec aren’t the only areas of North America that get a multi-day death metal festival. We have one right here in Toronto tooI
Ontario Death Fest 7
Day 1
Featuring: Outre-Tombe, Necrosadist, Earthworm Von Doom, Nervous Impulse, Bayte Lahm, Burdizzo
Date: Friday October 25th, 2019
Venue: Junction City Music Hall in Toronto, Ontario
I missed Burdizzo but I wasn’t too hung up on that. I’ve seen them before and they’re okay. It’s kind of funny that they’re on so many bigger shows (as local support) but still get stuck as the opening band of this entire festival. I did catch
Bayte Lahm and they were pretty good except they had no low end (no bass player and I don’t think their drums were mic’d). They were some cool grindcore that bordered on art-grind. Very dissonant.
Nervous Impulse were f***ing incredible except their vocal microphone wasn’t working for the first half of their set and wasn’t very loud for the second half. They played a little long too. Fifteen or twenty minutes would have been perfect but they played double that. Still, if you miss None So Vile-era Cryptopsy this band is for you. I bought both of their full-length albums.
Nervous Impulse1. Why Did You Shake Our Baby?
2. Air Burst/500 Miles
3. Syrian ATO Meat Grinder
4. Rockstars Faggotry
5. Act Your Age
6. Time to Panic
7. Deer Fly
8. More Hate
9. Vivre et laisser vivre
10. Mouth Breather
11. The Last Call
12. “Mustard”
13. Allergic to All Cities
A large portion of the crowd left after Nervous Impulse because the bartender wasn’t serving anyone who was too drunk.
They were the smart ones.
Earthworm Von Doom were f***ing terrible. I’ve been over joke-grindcore for a long time. They did do back-to-back covers of
You Keep a Diary and
Van Full of Retards but even those were horrible. Plus they had fourteen minutes of material but twenty minutes to play, so they played one riff and made noise for the last six minutes of their set. Not good.
Necrosadist were not as cool as their name but after the previous band it was refreshing to hear a band that practiced. I don’t usually like brutal slam death with pig squeals but Necrosadist are one of the better bands I’ve heard of that style. Their singer was cuddly.
I saw
Outre-Tombe at the Maryland Deathfest back in May but I didn’t remember them being so good. I think they were the first band I saw that weekend and I hadn’t drank a drop by that point. But tonight Outre-Tombe were awesome, although they too played to long. Sadly they’d packed up all their merch before their set because I was prepared to buy their albums afterwards.
Outre-Tombe1. La crypte
2. L’Antre de l’horreur
3. Frappe orbitale
4. Aberration
5. Repurgation
6. Ecorche vif
7. Au nom de la science
8. Ronge par les miasmes
9. Necrovortex
10. Mutation
11. Carnage mental
12. Psychose toxique
Outre-Tombe
www.facebook.com/Outre-Tombe-218914374800803/Necrosadist
www.facebook.com/Necrosadist-104321006429048/Earthworm Von Doom
www.facebook.com/earthwormVD/Nervous Impulse
www.facebook.com/NervousImpulseGrind/Bayte Lahm
Burdizzo
www.facebook.com/BurdizzoGrind/Day 2
Featuring: Malignancy, Vesication, Gland, Vile Driver, Bastard Son, Of Hatred Spawn
Venue: the Baby G in Toronto, Ontario
Date: Saturday October 26th, 2019
Of all the bars and clubs I go to I really do hate the Baby G. Their beer and spirits selection is absolute garbage. It really isn’t the venue you’d think would have part of a Death Metal festival held at it either but here we are.
I showed up during
Of Hatred Spawns last few songs. They were forgettable death metal.
Bastard Son were good as long as they played fast but their mid-tempo stuff dragged. Their vocalist wasn’t very good either.
Viledriver took ten minutes too long to set up and thus only got to play for twenty minutes but that was better suited to their style of mathcore-y grindcore. They were way better than the previous bands but I remember liking them much more when I saw them a few years ago.
When I saw the cover of their new EP I thought
Gland were going to be another joke grindcore band that sucked but they turned out to be really f***ing awesome goregrind. I liked them lots and I would’ve bought their albums if they weren’t already all
free to download off Bandcamp.
Gland1. Mouthful
2. Deterioration of Flesh
3. Shit Faced
4. Fun in the Mung
5. Postmortem Prolapse
6. Pecker Wrecker
7. Pyrophillic Consumption
8. Jabba the Butt
9. Chainsaw Episiotomy
A few months ago I was at a show and I left two songs into
Vesications set. They were okay but I only really stuck around tonight because Malignancy hadn’t played yet.
Thank f***ing God for
Malignancy. I believe I saw them at Maryland Death Fest this spring and while that’s all a blur they sound like the kind of upper-class band that would have been there. They played their entire 1999 album ‘Intrauterine Cannibalism’ tonight but out of sequence and it was awesome. I bought the CD afterwards and it comes with the original version as well as a re-recorded version from this year. The liner notes don’t make it clear but I think the 1999 version is better. I don’t know. One version is muddy and one sounds awesome. I’d like to think the newer version is the better one but I can’t figure it out. And who really cares? They also played two other songs tonight that were pretty much indistinguishable from their other songs. Much like every other band this weekend they played to maybe thirty people but they were the only ones that were aware about it and joked around about it.
Night two was drizzling shits. I loved Malignancy and Gland but the rest were all crap. There was a Halloween show in town that I really wish I could have gone to instead but I’d already committed to this. My expectations for night three couldn’t be lower.
Malignancy
www.facebook.com/MalignancyOfficial/Vesication
www.facebook.com/vesication/Gland
www.facebook.com/glandofficial/Vile Driver
www.facebook.com/viledrivermetal/Bastard Son
www.facebook.com/BastardSonDeathmetal/Of Hatred Spawn
www.facebook.com/ofhatredspawn/Day 3
Featuring: Putrid Pile, Fumigation, Entity, A Scar for the Wicked, Mors Verum, Death Perception
Date: Sunday October 27th, 2019
Venue: Sneaky D’s in Toronto, Ontario
I got there in time to catch
Death Perception. They’re more metalcore than death metal but I really like them. I only got their setlist because it was laying around after the show piled with all their gear but they didn’t play all those songs. They sounded really good tonight but I felt bad for them for reasons that I’ll get into later.
Death Perception1. Normalcy Bias
2. “Vermin”
3. Come Get Some
4. Stomach For A Spine
5. Hangman
6. Slavery By Consent
7. “In the Plain”
8. “The Kill”
9. Severed Ties
“Later” being now. They went on before
Mors Verum; the two-man, rhythm section-less death metal band who got added to tonight’s show on Friday. They have some good moments but it’s really hard to take them seriously. But as easy as they are to mock you have to admire their balls to get up there and do it with a crowd giving them blank stares.
A Scar for the Wicked weren’t that bad. They were a new school death metal band so they sounded exactly like the Black Dahlia Murder. I kept thinking they were called “Asguard the Wicked” and that’s really a way cooler name. Anyway, I’ve never seen a bass player watch his fretting hand so intently as theirs did.
I’ve warmed up to technical death metal as of late so
Entity arrived at just the right time. Tonight had been the worst night by far so I was glad to hear anything in my realm of enjoyment. They were really good and they even had breakdowns to appease the “core” crowd. I bought their new album ‘Hypostatization’ afterwards.
I swear I’ve seen
Fumigation before. If I haven’t I swear I’ve supposed to have seen them before and showed up after they played or something. After a male dominated weekend of metal it was refreshing to see a band with a girl leading the assault. So there you go some of the posters in the Rise of the Skywalker thread; I’m not a misogynist piece of shit. Eat me. They were some good grindcore. And they get bonus points for their guitar playing wearing a Goblin shirt, of who I was supposed to see one incarnation of last weekend and a different incarnation of next weekend but both tours/ shows got cancelled.
Putrid Pile closed out this garbage and he was the perfect way to end this clown show: “Peter Griffin does Mortician”. I only stuck around because I’d already committed my whole weekend and had nothing to lose. And what was left of the crowd was such a wreck that it was fun to watch.
Putrid Pile
www.facebook.com/PutridPileOfficial/Fumigation
www.facebook.com/fumigationmetal/Entity
www.facebook.com/EntityMbOfficial/A Scar for the Wicked
www.facebook.com/ASFTW/Mors Verum
www.facebook.com/morsverumband/Death Perception
www.facebook.com/333DP/So Ontario Deathfest has a way to go until it reaches that upper tier of metal festivals. Shit, it still has a way to go until it reaches the lower tier. It was exhausting but not in the way Maryland Deathfest is. It was a long weekend of mediocrity and waiting (hoping) that the next band would be better. The price was a little much. $75 got me all three nights plus a shirt. I’d say $50 would have been a little more reasonable for what it was. At the most there were maybe forty or fifty people at any of the shows. I myself had higher expectations. My preference of death metal leans more towards old school, bestial and gore and there wasn’t really any of that this weekend. Even the bands that I liked weren’t styles I’d normally listen to. There are a lot of better death metal bands in the North East that they could have picked from but it was what it was. Had it been a one-night affair with Malignancy or Outre-Tombe headlining as well as Nervous Impulse, Gland and Entity it would have been one of the better shows of the year. But then it wouldn’t have been “Ontario Deathfest”, since of those only Gland are from Ontario.
It was still fun and I was happy to share it with a small group of people. But I do that every weekend. Should it happen I doubt I’ll be attending all three nights of Ontario Deathfest next year but maybe one night if they have a particularly good band playing.
Gorgasm were supposed to play Saturday but must have dropped off months ago. And other band called Ihllhi dropped out at the last second and that's what gave Mors Verum their slot.
Bands should play a half an hour, tops.