The Grog Shop, a dive bar usually choked by the ghosts of Pabst Blue Ribbon past, pulsed with a different kind of energy – a transgressive, nihilistic energy that clawed its way up from the frozen depths of Norway. 1349, the black metal veterans whose music is as bleak as a midnight fjord in winter, had arrived, and let's just say, "Hellfire" feels like a quaint description for the sonic maelstrom they unleashed.
The night unfolded like a slow descent into aural madness. Antichrist Siege Machine the openers, were a brutal baptism. Their guitars were pure sonic napalm, melting the faces off the unsuspecting crowd with a relentless barrage of discordant riffs. Antichrist Siege Machine wasn't interested in subtlety. Guitarist and vocalist, Ryan Zell took the stage by wielding giant knife with spikes plunging it into the top of the speaker cabinet. From there it was all hell breaking loose. Their music was a middle finger to melody, a bludgeoning assault that left the crowd wanting more. The frantic drumming of Scott Bartley was like a battery of missiles being fired, the vocals, visceral and unforgiving.
Antichrist Siege Machine Bludgeoning the Crowd In Cleveland
By the time Spectral Wound took the stage, the Grog Shop was a pressure cooker of anticipation. The air hung thick with sweat, the metallic tang of blood, and the acrid sweetness of burnt hair and tremolo riffs. Spectral Wound conjured the demons of black metal past with their unparalleled, relentless assault. Clad in leather, sweat and grease paint, a testament to the grittiness and despair that is black metal. Jonah Campbell's vocals cut the air like a knife, Illusory's drumming is nothing short of impeccable, driving the crowd on a one way trip to hell. From the opening riffs it was clear this band was on a mission.
Spectral Wound
Then, the heavens opened, or perhaps more accurately, the gates of hell. 1349 emerged from the shadows, their corpse paint stark against the blood-red stage lights. Ravn, the vocalist, looked like a banshee. His shrieks could curdle milk at fifty paces, and his lyrics, were a descent into the abyss of pure, unadulterated hatred. Seidemann and Archaon, the guitarists, wielded their instruments like weapons of mass sonic destruction, weaving a tapestry of frozen dissonance that scraped the bone and left a lingering chill that no amount of cheap beer could erase. Nils Fjellström's drumming was some of the best work I’ve witnessed or experienced.
The crowd became a living entity, a seething mass of black-clad bodies contorting in a synchronized ballet of fury during blast beats. Fists pumped the air in a macabre celebration of rebellion, a middle finger to the mundane. The floor transformed into a churning vortex of flailing limbs and bodies, a microcosm of pure, primal chaos that threatened to consume the entire bar.
Stage lights strobed like a strobe warning on a runaway nightmare, casting grotesque shadows that danced on the sweat-slicked faces of the crowd. The stench of burnt offerings – not to any gods, mind you, but to the countless cigarettes and dubious concoctions sacrificed at the altar of rock and roll – hung heavy in the air.
Through the madness, 1349 remained a terrifyingly precise machine. Their music was a blizzard of blast beats and tremolo picking, relentless as a horde of Viking berserkers on a rampage. Ravn's vocals were a cacophony of hate and despair, echoing through the venue like the screams of the damned swirling in the ninth circle of Dante's Inferno.
As the final notes of "Abyssos Antithesis" faded into a ringing silence, the crowd erupted. It was a primal roar of appreciation, a cathartic release of the energy that had been building throughout the night. 1349 hadn't just played a concert; they'd staged a sonic coup, stripping Cleveland bare of anything resembling normalcy and leaving behind the scorched earth of pure black metal euphoria.
Walking out of the Grog Shop that night, I felt reborn, albeit in a slightly more corpse-painted kind of way. The city lights of Cleveland seemed…different. Sharper, somehow, as if the grime of reality had been momentarily scoured clean by the sonic brutality I had just witnessed. The world, perhaps, a little less meaningless. Or maybe that was just the lingering after-effects of the cheap beer and the three hours of sonic punishment. Either way, one thing was for sure: 1349 had left their mark on Cleveland.
-Josh Harris, Writer and Photographer.
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