Words by

Clyde Bradford

An evening of extreme music on what was probably the sunniest weekend Iceland has seen so far this year? It does seem a little incongruous, but once we’re inside the dark, dank confines of Kaffistofan the pleasant weather outside can easily be forgotten. Covered windows, incense and walls daubed in blood and symbols set the scene amply enough. Things are about to get evil.
First up is AMFJ, an artist described by this very publication as a “one-man death march of genocidal sound destruction”. Seems pretty close to the mark to me. Looping, hypnotic noise with a bearded gent howling over the top.
Next we have Abominor who seem to have a nice old-school black metal vibe going on. I can only say that they seem to have this vibe because the sound is so bad inside Kaffistofan. You know when you watch a poorly recorded live video on YouTube on crappy laptop speakers and you can barely make out what’s going on? Well it basically sounded like that, except a hell of a lot louder. It means that working out what’s going on is a pretty damn hard task because I could see the guitarists move about on the fret-board but I couldn’t hear it in my ears. All I can hear is a wall of noise. This sucks because Abominor seem to be pretty decent and the drummer kicked up a nice groove. I will check them out again if I have the chance.
Gone Postal were in the same boat with the poor sound, which is frustrating because when I saw them last, at the Metal Battle at Sódóma a few months back, they sounded rad. Seen as Gone Postal’s repertoire isn’t all full-throttle blasting it was a bit easier to tell what’s happening though. They’ve got a nice death metal thing going on.
And so onto Svartidauði’s vicious black metal assault. Again, the set was marred by bad sound. This meant that a lot of their more intricate guitar work was lost in the wall of noise and things only became clear during songs’ slower sections. One such section occurred at the tail end of Svartidauði’s set and was truly crushing. It sounded utterly malevolent and made up for the frustration that the sound had caused through the night.