It was not long ago that I had my latest run in with the Canadian death metallers of Kataklysm (Metalfest earlier in the summer), and as that show had impressed me greatly I was certainly ready for another dose of northern hyperblast.

”We will tear your souls apart”
- Maurizio Iacono (vocals)

With a mighty introduction like this, how could Kataklysm go wrong?
The crowd had also grown considerably since the last band we saw this day (Moonsorrow) so my expectation towards this show was pretty high. Sadly, they would be turned to naught...
Sure enough, the heavy music was pounding through like a relentless steam roller and the band members were showing Olympic quality speed headbanging, but still it didn’t affect me in the least. To put it plainly, this was boring the hell out of me. There was no spark, no connection. ”There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering – a hell of boredom” Victor Hugo once wrote, and if it was with this in mind that Iacono uttered the above sentence, then I must admit that Kataklysm were well on their way to fulfilling it. Ok, so the general fan was happy enough to raise his horns in the air, and also headbang like hell on command, but I was not far from abandoning this show to its own fate...

Then suddenly something happened.
It was for the song As I Slither, and I guess Iacono and the boys were beginning to feel that this was not going their way. So what he did was to call out for something he dubbed; ”...the Kataklysm security stress test...”, which basically meant that everyone who could should start crowd-surfing up to the stage to give the security personnel something to do as they were beginning to look bored (go figure). Well, let’s just say Iacono got his wish; I mean, it was insane! Insane I tell you!
I have never in my life seen so many crowd-surfers at once, at times it almost appeared as though there were more people on top than there was people holding them up, and there was a veritable highway of people pushing out of the security pit, all ready to get right back up to take the ride again, and again, and again. And again.
Truly, there seemed to be no end of the flowing mass of metalheads, and after this the show truly took off. This was apparently just the kind of kick-start the band and atmosphere had been in dire need of; at least the show really grew from here on out. The flow of crowd-surfers did eventually die down a little bit, but only to make place for no less than two enormous circle pits for At The Edge Of The World.

I can’t pride myself with being a big connoisseur of Kataklysm’s music even though I have seen them on the road a couple of times or more by now, but I took an interested note in that they chose to end one of their songs by covering the end-riff of Davidian by Machine Head, or so I thought. After a little bit of digging it turns out the song, Like Angels Weeping (The Dark) (if you hadn’t figured that one out by yourselves already), actually does end this way. Whether or not the (extreme) similarity is by choice or a mere coincidence I cannot say, but it did lift my mood even more at the show.
So, by doing a complete 180 in the middle of the set, Kataklysm managed to go from lethally boring to pretty damn catchy all at the hands of one little comment, and that in itself deserves some praise I think! The show may not be the best overall experience I’ve had with the band, but from now on Kataklysm will always be fondly connected to that insane moment of ”security stress test” in this reporters mind.

Setlist (incomplete):

A Soulless God
Illuminati
In Shadows & Dust
As I Slither
AT The Edge Of The World
Like Angels Weeping (The Dark)
Crippled & Broken