Belphegor Swallow Your Soul at Lee's Palace

jaybroderick
13 minutes ago
4 min read

Belphegor perform live at Lee's Palace in Toronto, Canada. Photo By: Jojo Taylor

By: Jojo Taylor Toronto, Canada - How do you take your Metal? Blackened!

What I love about Lee’s Palace is they are a club that hosts a wide variety of music. They support local acts that want to play a bigger stage or they are a stage for international artists to play to an intimate crowd. So, when a band comes in from around the world, Toronto loves to visit these clubs, because you wouldn’t be able to do that in other countries where these artists have a larger following.

Just visit the Blast Toronto Directory and click on the Lee’s Palace icon to see who will be there in the future.

Narcotic Wasteland

Dallas Toler-Wade performs live at Lee' Palace. Photo By: Jojo Taylor

These "Barbarian"s hail from The Carolinas. Guitarist Dallas Toler-Wade took 14 years of being in a band Nile, in which he needed to forge a new sound. Narcotic Wasteland is born with their brand of technical death metal.

At Lee’s Palace these Barbarians stomped on your head just to feel the crunch of your skull. In fact it felt like someone took an automatic nail gun to your head and just opened up. The capacity crowd was riding hard on this band just to feel the carnage of crashing a car and flipping it over and over again. This crowd was out for some action and got it in spades with all four bands.

The singer, Dallas, has a very harsh vocal style that is out to rip old wounds open and reveals your inner trauma. Personally, I love watching bass player Kenji Tsunami. He still reminds me of a spider on crack when he is in full throttle on his bass. Many people walked up to him after the show to let him know how much they loved watching him play.

Hate

With a doom laden drum opening, Hate ushered in a shitstorm and mowed the audience down right away. They brought us quickly back with a rousing, "HEY HEY HEY!"

This is a Polish blackened metal band from 1990 with those oh so good guttural vocals. Adam "ATF Sinner", has the right tone of vocals for this band that continued to impress me with their professional stage presence. They retained the rawness of hateful emotions that they love to throw out at us. Their choreographed head swinging really kept the energy high as the slaughter of vicious sounds bred a higher understanding of connecting a crowd with a syncopated form of rancor and venom.

My favourite moment was near the end with their song “Bellum Regiis”. It started off slow, which was a rare moment of the entire evening. There were very few quiet moments this evening. The overall dreadfulness of the song just filled our soul full of past pain. This is what the crowd really wanted, a place to release their dark energy.

Incantation

This was a band I was not fully prepared for. Hailing from New York, they formed in 1989 and now reside in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. They have released 12 full length albums so far.

They started with their backs to the audience and when they turned around we all were hit with the most brutal assault ever! Not only did it beat through your chest but it pushed your soul all the way through as well. The drumming was so intense that it felt like a defibulator attached to a jackhammer. This was so intense that it felt like you were in the middle of an earthquake as you watched pieces of the ceiling falling to the ground, (I am not kidding).

This was the band that really shook the crowd into action. I sat at the side watching a solid mosh pit and watching the audience go crowd surfing. It was a mix of men and women. In fact one large fan barely made it to the stage and was helped up by the band. His pants slipped down far enough to give us the important message of saying no to crack! (See photo below).

Belphegor

Belphegor formed in Salzburg, Austria in 1991. They began as “Betrayer” but changed their name in 1993. They have 12 studio albums.

They opened their show with nice and easy creepy music which quickly changed into a large sound before going full tilt with the most rapid fire sound. It felt like a large organization of hell rabbits going at it all at once. Maybe this is the feeling of being sprayed by a machine gun. It didn’t matter, these people were here to get the full assault and battery treatment and every band was happy to oblige.

Hel Lennart, the singer, has a very cold and technical edge to his sound. This would be a band that you may hear while you are being tortured by the military in a containment camp. This incredible noise is a headache's worst nightmare, or maybe a root canal without anesthesia.

I wasn’t sure if this band was trying to swallow your souls or just chew it to bits. I think when Hel picked up a goat skull to drink from it, the crowd felt relieved that it was a goat skull instead of them. With songs like, “The Devil’s Son”, “Stigma Diabolicum” and, “Totentanz - Dance Macabre”, you know this band is after your soul.

Concert Photo Gallery (all photos by: Jojo Taylor)