Live review from Death Metal Dungeon:
1. The Smouldering Pone
2. Vacant Throne
3. Eternal Submission
4. Inside the Abyss
5. Burned to Ashes
6. Persephone
Not even waiting to be introduced, slam deathcore monsters Sky Burial blasted straight into their first track, The Smouldering Pone, spewing a furious, pitiless sound straight from the ninth circle of hell. If you wanted a band that separated the hardcore from the lime cordials, this was it; indeed, it was not long before a few members of the crowd scurried from the venue.
Yonnie’s soul-grindingly brutal vocals over crushing guitars and violent drumming tore at the eardrums; at some point, I realized that the beer can I was holding was vibrating to every baleful bellow spewing from her mouth, riffs pounding like a blacksmith’s hammer. Even the air conditioning was toiling amid such a blistering assault, leading to the band politely requesting that it (and the bass) be turned up before barreling into Vacant Throne.
As third track Eternal Submission kicked in, half the crowd still appeared to be in a state of shock, the other half’s heads locked in rhythmic pounding as sweeping arpeggio sections descended into slow, sludgy strumming that felt as if you were being slowly pulled into a swamp’s dark depths.
After another long break between songs – an unwelcome constant throughout the set – things really kicked off as the opening bars of Inside the Abyss shot out, metalheads crashing together in the pit like particles in a hadron collider. Burned To Ashes saw no let-up in the savagery, Yonnie’s vocal cords valiantly withstanding the almost 40-minute-long torture session they’d been subjected to all the way to the last bars of closer Persephone.
Sky Burial’s set felt less like watching a band and more like feeling them in the darkest parts of your soul. From the ear-shattering vocals to the frenzied flailing of the guitars to parts where it felt like sinking through treacle in slow motion, the group – consisting of several ex-members of Human Betrayer – truly transformed the Wave Music Studio into a Death Metal Dungeon from which some would have been happy never to escape.
– Ti Zae Yi
