If you get close enough down the front you can see, when the lights hit him in the right way, the scarred angles of flesh where Deicide frontman Glen Benton infamously branded an inverted cross into his forehead. To reach such a location, though, requires Indiana Jones-like fortitude, as the area immediately stage-front is, by this stage, a chaotic battleground of cannoning tattooed limbs, with sweating death metal fans ricocheting about like atoms in a chemical reaction.
With my sensibly short hair and bottle of spring water I’m feeling slightly out of place, although within instants of the band taking the stage and launching into "Scars of the Crucifix" the place had erupted, the man in front of me had his beer flung vertically, his momentum knocking me back into the person behind, whose drink then spilled all down my back. Thus drenched in alcohol, it feels as though I’ve been given some kind of unholy baptism, which is appropriate, given Benton and company’s wantonly irreligious slant, and each song thereafter offers some bluntly impolite observation on one or more of the holy trinity and their followers ("Kill The Christian", "Lunatic of God’s Creation", "Christ Denied" etc).
Arriving at the venue that night I’d passed, amid the obligatory ranks of long haired ladies and (mainly) gentlemen in their Deicide ‘Fuck Your God’ t-shirts, a young man dressed in a Halloween skeleton body suit, who in a single sartorial step trod firmly on death metal’s Achilles Heel – its constipated lack of humour.
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To be fair to Benton in this regard, tonight he seems to be enjoying himself, a sardonic smile forcing its way onto his lips between songs as he surveys the forest of raised devil horn gestures before him. With his permanently furrowed brow he looks to be a man trying at all times to be evil, yet undermined by his enjoyment of the whole caper. Facially he bears a distinct resemblance to Philip Madoc’s Solon in the classic Doctor Who adventure The Brain of Morbius, albeit one clad in leather trousers amid the unholiest of metal riots.
Drummer Steve Asheim appears to have misplaced his snare drum altogether; instead, a relentless battery of double bass drum pedals pound out at the speed of a copulating dormouse’s heartbeat, twin guitars spiral out like snowflakes in a storm and Benton’s inhuman guttural vocal roars above. The split second precision with which each infernal gallop comes to a dead halt is testament to their instrumental prowess, a reminder that there is a deal of thought behind the nihilistic wall of noise, and fourteen years after their eponymous debut Deicide remain close to the summit of death metal’s thunderous hierarchy.
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