As part of their unholy blasphemous summer tour, Profanatica visited desolate Satanic wasteland Houston, Texas and put on a hell of a show despite failing air conditioning, thronging hipsters, and exploding toilets.

See our Profanatica interview here, reviews (including Havohej and the LARM take), blasphemy (tributes:iVomit and Kerry), and updates.

The show started with Mexico’s Unidad Trauma who were tight and precise in their rendition of a hybrid between Exhumed and Macabre with influences from modern metal, which they bashed out while wearing full medical costumes and without missing a note. Very practiced band.

Somewhere during this set, the toilets blew up. First we noticed a few gallons of fluid leaking energetically from the men’s room, and then, people with horrified faces, plungers, and mops descended on the ladies’ room.

At this point, a sign went up on the back door: use bathroom next door, at the cool little occult shop run apparently by the same team that runs the Black Magic Social Club.

This bathroom comedically featured a lack of a door, a roll of toilet paper on the floor, and a bucket underneath the sink to catch the constant spew from a leaky pipe. It seems to be a metaphor for Houston, sweating out Lone Star until you have to take a dump in a bathroom that looks like an art project from a concentration camp.

After this came Knoll, which is sort of a hybrid between Maudlin of the Well, contemporary metalcore, Empyrium, and Infester. The music centers around the vocals which tell a story and the riffs follow along, with some quality riffs and musicianship.

However, the ultimate product does not hold together like music; it is more like watching a movie guided by an MST3K commentary with instruments. The songs are therefore about the words, and like the “painted word” in art, it means that something is lost.

Ironically they had the biggest showing of the night. A lot of large soft people showed up from Reddit and took videos on their phones. The band had an excessively performative aesthetic, seeming to exaggerate the motions required to play instruments, and they were like eighteen people on stage.

Their show felt too much means-over-ends, namely that each individualistic player needed to express how cool it was that they were in a band, and they needed the band to validate that. The audience seemed to think it was up on stage and sharing the same importance, which made the experience pure.

Somewhere in here the air conditioning started to fall short. There was constant cold air blowing but it was blocked by the large crowd and the room never quite managed to get back to livable temperatures. After this we might move to northern Finland so we never have to deal with this nonsense again.

Lots of these fans left before Profanatica. This baffled everyone but Claire and I found a sofa and camped out while watching Paul Ledney and his team try to convince the venue to make some changes to sound production and organization.

Profanatica came out in their civilian clothes and did an extensive sound check and setup, then vanished into a back room. A staffer sprayed frankincense across the stage area and demonic sounds from tape, like the cackling and screaming of non-human demonic entities, filled the club.

Then the band emerged, wearing robes and head coverings with corpse paint, and we saw an entirely different type of performance. They were acting out ritual facial aversion and impassivity, and this was more haunting than any kind of human performance could ever be.

When we say the band was professional, what should be said is this: they were incredibly organized, in complete unison about how to behave and play, tight like Morbid Angel, and as choreographed and dance-like as an occult ritual.

In other words, they were thoroughly convinced as they bashed out a collection that leaned toward the recent but thankfully covered vital parts of Profanatitas de Domonatia and finished with the classic “Weeping in Heaven” from Dethrone the Son of God and the split with Masacre.

This may be one of the best shows in memory simply because the band dedicated themselves so much to portraying an artistic event, instead of over-performing the acts of being in a band. The band in fact felt transparent, like they were channeling this music from elsewhere.

Unlike most performances, this one showed us ends-over-means thinking: the ends were a musical presentation of ideas through sensation, and the means were everything else, including the players, who minimized themselves to roles and abstracted away personality.

Amazing professionalism and intensity from this band marked an experience that captivated the crowd despite some poseurs up front counter-signaling their poseurdom by moshing like teens at a Toxic Waste show, even though they were in their forties.

Profanatica have always railed against the pure and perfect and their music often sounds like a semaphore of interrupted consistency designed to shatter the mind-lock of repetition in the consciousness. The poseurs do not get this and just want pure moshing rhythms.

After the band finished with “Weeping in Heaven,” during which the entire audience howled out I VOMIT ON GOD’S CHILD at the right moment, the concert ended with as much discipline as with it began, and a final snare hit sent us out into the baking muggy night to take home this vision of disruptive blasphemy.

Tags: black magic social club, Black Metal, knoll, profanatica, unidad trauma