LIVE REVIEW: Sepultura, Jinjer, Obituary, Jesus Piece, Eventim Apollo, London, 12/11/2024

Photo Credit: Rob Tilbury

The halfway point of Sepultura’s 18-month-long extravaganza farewell tour – Celebrating Life Through Death – is spent in the UK, where the Brazilian heavy metal giants bring their “celebration of the past and the present” one final time. When the band announced the tour, they expressed their “right to a dignified death…to choose to live free and to choose when you die!” Sepultura may have chosen a dignified death, but it was anything from a close your eyes and peacefully slip away kind of death; accompanied by Jinjer, Obituary and Jesus Piece, the final goodbye was a soul-stomping, gut-wrenching epic from start to finish. 

The Philadelphia metalcore outfit Jesus Piece spin-kicked off the night and, what they lacked in finessed stage presence and fine-tuned performance, they more than made up for with chaotic energy and unbridled fervour. Their setlist consisted mainly of tracks from their 2023 album …So Unknown, with An Offering to the Night, in particular, causing a spectacular number of heads to bang; when vocalist Aaron Heard screamed for a circle pit, a small but mighty spinning hole appeared. With each song, Jesus Piece visibly and audibly ramped up the heat, the rage and the energy in the Eventim Apollo. When it was time for their final track, Conjure Life, the crowd’s consensus was unanimous: Jesus Piece were “sick!” and well worth coming for at the ungodly early hour of 5:45pm. 8/10 

Sufficiently warmed up, with one crowd member having even removed their shirt to perform some peck dances in the interim, there was no rest for the wicked: next up were American death metal titans Obituary. Beginning their set with the beat-heavy instrumental Redneck Stomp, encouraged even the bar dwellers and coat holders to stamp their feet. When they started Threatening Skies and John Tardy’s iconic growling vocals sliced through the air, we were left to wonder, not for the first time, how this band is only second on the bill. With the menacing guitar and bass, pounding drum beats and Tardy’s spine-tingling vocals, which are simultaneously the finishing touch and the core of the canvas, their set was a work of art. Even when asking the crowd: “London, how are we doing out there?” Tardy growled out the words, in such a way that we now feel disappointed every time someone asks us how we are doing and they don’t death growl the question. 

Tardy hunched over like an evil witch, unleashing a barrage of guttural screams on the only too-eager crowd, is why Obituary are a band you must see live. They chopped together their setlist in such a way that we were always left feeling slightly on edge. Have they stormed off the stage, or do they prefer ominous silence filled with green smoke to crowd interaction? Is this jarring crescendo followed by piercing silence actually the end of the song, or are they sadistically teasing us? When the ass-long-haired, death metal growling riff gods left the stage, tears could be seen in the eyes of some of the crowd, from 16 to 60-year-olds. 9/10

Our final support band of the night were Ukrainian four-piece Jinjer. Their exciting progressive metal sound, described by some metal elite as “musical perfection,” is not being disputed. On tracks such as Teacher, Teacher! and Someone’s Daughter, Tatiana Shmayluk displayed her impressive array of vocal talent, from eerie cleans to brutal growls, on top of the band’s unique groove-heavy melodies. Unfortunately, Shmayluk seemed to struggle with the Eventim Apollo acoustics to make her unclean vocals carry as well as her clean ones. The synergy of the band also fell a little flat, which could be felt in the crowd whose energy had definitely dwindled since the initial onslaught of Jesus Piece and Obituary. A surplus of surfers rode the Jinjer crowd waves, with the final track Rogue causing particular excitement. Perhaps the expectations had been too high for critically-acclaimed Jinjer because on this night they were good, but not great. 6/10

“SEPULTURA. SEPULTURA. SEPULTURA.” The chants for Sepultura from their London-based SepulNation were deafening. From the moment the opening notes of Policia teased us over the loudspeakers before the band had even made it to the stage, the crowd lost their minds. All it took was the Refuse / Resist riff to make us feel like we were in a tin of band T-shirt-clad live sardines. The raw magic of this tin was being able to alternate between the front, where we were so close to the band that Derrick Green’s temple sweat and spit were visible, and the chaotic centre, where the intensity of Sepultura’s heavy metal musical genius could be felt with every fibre of our (later to be a tad bloody and bruised) being. 

The setlist was a masterfully curated journey through Sepultura’s legacy. Following the Chaos A.D. opening trilogy, the band took us through a Sepultura time vortex, from Arise’s first single Dead Embryonic Cells to Quadra’s thrash-heavy track Means to an End. No era of Sepultura was shown favouritism; the crowd remained alive with the raging passion of a thousand suns throughout the set, and were rewarded for their loyalty with a couple of lucky souls being invited onstage for Kaiowas to bang drums with the band. However, the most iconic drumming moment of the night was when Sepultura newbie, and drumming virtuoso, Greyson Nekrutman took the spotlight for a drum solo ahead of Ratamahatta. With an absolute explosion of Brazilian influences, and an ungodly rainbow of vocals and riffs to make even the most inexpressive of humans want to unleash the beast, this is not a track that needs any further hype. And yet, Nekrutman’s solo blasted the crowd on a rollercoaster of anticipation, using his hands, fingertips and elbows, as well as drumsticks, to solidify his place with the band on their final ever tour. 

We had one song left, and not a single soul in the 5,000-strong SepulNation couldn’t guess which track this would be: Roots Bloody Roots. As soon as Andreas Kisser plucked his first guitar string, the crowd went into a high-energy frenzy that did not resemble a group of sweaty humans who were tired from hours of moshing. To think that we will never experience Sepultura live in the UK again is a depressing thought, but what a farewell show that was (and never say never, right…?). “Brazil’s messenger to the world” had one final message to give: Sepultura may be waving a formal goodbye, but the roots of their legacy as one of heavy metal’s major forces have burrowed so deep that no predator has a chance of ripping them up. 10/10