Review from Death’s Embrace:
1. The Smouldering One
2. Vacant Throne
3. Eternal Submission
4. Inside the Abyss
5. psyche
6. Lifeline
7. Persephone
Sky Burial are an established presence at Underground events, having also played at Death Revisited and Death Metal Dungeon within the last 18 months. Formed with members of the dormant (and excellent) Human Betrayer, Sky Burial plumb similar depths of dark sound, with doom-laden chord progression, ominous vocal growls and sluggish breakdowns.
Vocalist Yonnie is a commanding presence; rather than relying on stage theatrics, she exacts a slow revenge, looming over the room like an evil ant queen surveying her obedient drones. She’s backed by guitarists Wilson and Randy, with drummer Shing holding it down on the kit (note: no bassist).
Both Underground reviewers have mentioned it before and it bears repeating again: the gaps between songs in Sky Burial’s sets are intolerably long. There’s something to be said for atmospheric pauses, but long silences punctuated with a cough from the crowd or crack of a beer can just feel awkward. It’s a physically demanding genre of music, but if each track requires a breather afterwards, there needs to be some thought paid to maintaining the tension and intrigue – a mysterious, spooky pre-recorded interlude would do the trick here and keep all eyes focused on the stage rather than prompting mass smartphone swiping.
The band warms up with The Smouldering One and Vacant Throne, then Eternal Submission kicks in with a real groove – a dancey riff held up by brassy, saucepan lid cymbal smashes. As the dry ice swirls, the riffing takes on a robotic quality, with jarring pig squeals mixed in. Like a baked cheesecake made from abattoir offcuts, the room is stodgy at the edges yet molten in the middle as a nascent mosh pit is sighted. Charged by the night’s nastiest riffs, punters began to jerk, pushing and bashing each other involuntarily, as if they were corpses animated by the electrical pulses of some mad scientist’s experiment. Guitarist Randy – a dead ringer for Slipknot’s Mick Thomson in look and style – busts out a creepy, atonal solo then slows the tempo, looking pleased at the violence that’s beginning to unfold before him.
A buzzsaw roars into life: Inside the Abyss blasts off with a galloping chug. Red stage lights flicker in warning as Shing unleashes a buffeting from the drums to the sound of a pentatonic bridge. The tempo slows, Yonnie’s vocals dip deeper than Hades to bring the song to close, and then there’s more silence and phones come out again. Someone burps.
Psyche is a chance for Randy and Wilson to show off some dexterity, moving from a tremolo opener to darkly tuned scales that merge and diverge like dual engines either side of Yonnie. Shing, ever a merciless coxswain, pounds a tempo that leads this imperilled outfit down the River Styx into the underworld. A pool of water mysteriously appears on the floor and sweaty moshers slip and slide – spilled booze or bodily fluids? Turns out it’s a faulty aircon. Bog roll is applied and proceedings continue. Randy sweeps back his hair – job well done.
Yonnie, tatted and lean, returns to looming over her subjects. Cymbals crash like lightning. Wilson spins elegant scales then holds down a single low note to give backbone to a solo by Randy. It sounds a bit messy, with a chaotic drum beat flat in the mix. Wilson slashes hand through the air to give emphasis to Yonnie’s dark utterances, the beat stop-starting furiously around him like the breakdown in Gojira’s Backbone.
On final song Persephone – the music video for which is released in December – the vocals are practically crocodilian, like stones grinding, evoking medieval torture instruments in brutality. Low notes reverberate all around the silhouetted singer, swirling like monstrous beings ready to do her bidding. It’s a total cacophony and further polish is required to take things up a notch. But it’s a deliciously dark and fun opening performance that sets the tone for another death metal showcase.
-El Jay
Review from Death Revisited:
1. The Smouldering One
2. Vacant Throne
3. Eternal Submission
4. Inside the Abyss
5. Burned to ashes
6. Persephone
Now comes Sky Burial, arguably the only true death metal band of the evening. A 4 member founded in 2017 (vocalist, 2 guitarist, drummer and… no bass player), and describing itself as a slam/death core band, the band lives up to its description with room to spare in a 50 minutes set.
Despite not having a bass player, the band delivered a full sound and rich rhythm, with the vocalist growling her way through the entire set. For some reasons the break between their first 2 songs were quite long and embarrassingly silence, at the end of the second song, the band and front-of-house decided there was a mic problem, and after swapping out the mic, everything went smoothly. The band delivered a really tight set, despite their songs having many tempo changes – I particularly want to compliment the drummer, who, in my opinion, was very competent. The band did not speak much between songs, which is not necessarily a bad thing, and their music “spoke for itself” and managed to whip the audience into a frenzy.
Aficionados of death metal, I daresay, would really enjoy this band – it delivers what it promises with good stage presence.
– Hazel-Rah
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
