By Kat Renz
These may be the enlightened days of reinvigorated heavy metal madness, but San Francisco hasn’t hosted a lineup of melodic death metal bands this hefty in a long time. On Thursday, May 29, at Slim’s, Sweden’s ever-fierce Arch Enemy leads the charge of sweeping arpeggios and throaty declarations on the second-to-last stop on their brief North American “Tyranny and Bloodshed" tour. Joining the brutal quintet are three Century Media label mates – compatriots Dark Tranquility, Divine Heresy, and Greece’s death metal offering Firewind. Insert a proper horned salute to Slim’s here for carrying the torch of loud, heavy music of late (Death Angel, Exodus, Slough Feg, and on Friday, May 30, Candlemass and Soilent Green).
Though hardly a household name, Arch Enemy has caught on with metal listeners. Their seventh full-length studio recording, Rise of the Tyrant (Century Media, 2007), debuted last September at no. 84 on the Billboard charts. It could have been higher had the genre’s fans not spent their audio allowance on another new release: Dethklok’s epic cartoon metal album, The Dethalbum, which clocked in at 34,000 copies during its first week out, making it purportedly the best-selling death-metal album to date.
Assembled in 1996 by former Carcass guitarist Michael Amott and ex-Carnage bandmate John Liiva, Arch Enemy’s infant days were especially notable for the technically devastating dual guitar work of brothers Michael and Christopher Amott. In 2001, the group replaced Liiva with a new vocalist, Angela Gossow. Arch Enemy’s since become lazily tagged as that band with the hot blonde Valkyrie who can growl as gutturally as any angry and seasoned death metal dude. Regardless Gossow holds her own in very male-dominated, aggression-fueled scene. (Fellow journalists with metal ambitions take note, there is hope: writing for a German metal mag at the time, Gossow landed the Arch Enemy gig after giving a demo tape to Christopher Amott during an interview.)
This brand of metal – dubbed “melodic death metal” or “Gothenburg metal” after the Swedish hub - may sound a contradiction in terms, but after a listen, it’s hard to hear it as anything else. Despite Gossow’s menacing vocals, Arch Enemy - like most bands in this sub-sub-sub-genre - borders on the catchy. Sure, it’s heavy as fuck. But the layers of complex guitar work, diverse interludes prompting complete mood changes, and soaring anthemic progressions punctuated by dual guitar finger-tapping interruptions elevates it to superhero music. Next time you run through the Norwegian woods alongside Odin and his pet wolves, choose melodic death-metal as your soundtrack.
Arch Enemy isn’t slated to be back around these parts till late 2009. In the meantime I’ll be engrossed in their album. Every minor third has been integrated into my emotional landscape, and each time signature change will be remembered by the muscles of my nodding neck, because the orgasmic pulsing of live metal is infinitely more powerful than...almost anything. Arch Enemy - nominated as the “Best Live Band” of 2008 by Metal Hammer - is not to be missed.
ARCH ENEMY
Thurs/29, 8 p.m., $23
Slim's
333 11th St., SF
(415) 255-0333
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