Pestilence and Cancer are joining forces to play an extreme set in Buenos Aires.

I remember seeing the flyer for the gig: Pestilence + Cancer, and the cover artwork from their albums “Consuming Impulse” and “To The Gory End”. And I softly laughed, thinking of the dozens and dozens of Death Metal album covers with a person in it being brutally murdered or having a horrendous death. It’s one of the most characteristic aspects of the old-school Death Metal golden era. Around the late 80s and the first half of the 90s.
This is the exact period where we find these two albums (“Consuming…” by Pestilence and “…Gory End” by Cancer).
In fact, once inside the venue, El Teatrito, at the gig, my surprise was bigger seeing at the merchandising store: they had an official tour shirt (called “The True Faces of Death”) that combined the two album covers in one single person suffering.

The date was 11th September, the last days of winter. I got to see the performances of the two supporting local acts, “Muerte Violenta” and “Razgos”. Both bands sounded very powerful. Muerte Violenta was kinda an old school Death Metal band with all the things you expect to hear in a band of the first wave of Floridian Death Metal: guitar riffs fully made by tremolo picking, traditional blast beats with a heavy hit, and whammy bar solos.

MUERTE VIOLENTA

Razgos, at first, was kinda the same thing, but as the songs were passing by, you could easily see the difference between their newest and oldest stuff. They had a visible evolution of sound, going from traditional to technical/progressive, with a bassist playing solos on his 6-string bass.

RAZGOS

At 20.40, Cancer arrived at the stage, after a long 9-year period, the band finally came back, and sounded stronger than ever. With a new album inside their pockets (“Inverted World”), the newest stuff started their set: “Enter the Gates”, “Inverted World”, and “Amputate”. With “Until They Died” in the middle.
“Into the Acid” and “Tasteless Incest” were the perfect contrast to move on to the classic era, followed by “Ballcutter” and “Garrotte” from the “Shadow Gripped” album.
With “Convert Operations” and “Corrosive,” they insisted on their new album, showing the crowd that they’re not a band that survives by the grip of their old hits; in fact, that new songs still have the same energy and unique personality that they had back in the young days.
But that doesn’t mean that they didn’t know what the fans waited so long to hear. So the end of the set was full of classic tracks: “Hung, Drawn and Quartered”, “C.F.C.” and “Death Shall Rise”.

CANCER

The gig ended on high with Pestilence hitting the stage at 10 pm and sounding as aggressive as everyone expected. 
The Technical Death Metal band showed us how thick a riff of an old school band is now in the Modern Metal era.
As Cancer did before, Pestilence started their set with songs from their new album “Exitivm”: “Morbvs Propagationem”, “Deificvs”, and “Sempiternvs”. And, basically, that was it. No more new songs were played in the rest of the show.
They came back to the first album, “Consuming Impulse”, and played a set of 3 songs in a row: “Dehydrated”, “The Process of Suffocation”, and “Chronic Infection”, followed by 2 songs from “Testimony of the Ancients”: “Prophetic Revelations” and “Twisted Truth”. These sets made the people go crazy as hell.
The band just took 2 years to come back, they weren’t a band that were used to including South America on following tours. But now it seems that they’re starting to realise how loved they are on these lands.
As Patrick Mameli was an obsessive with order (something that would be easy to believe if you listen to the music he composed), the following songs were 3 songs from the “Resurrection Macabre” album (the whole show was divided into “album sets”): “Resurrection Macabre”, “Devouring Frenzy”, and “Horror Detox”. 
Heading to the end of the gig, the final songs were 2 huge hits: “Out of the Body” and “Land of Tears”.
And we went home, hoping we could repeat a Pestilence show in 2 years.

Review by Agustin Lopez

Photos by Jorgelina Fernandez

Produced by Icarus Music

Press Marcela Scorca