Liturgy, Umbra Vitae played Middle East – 12/15

One of the year’s great metal tours got a local boost from Umbra Vitae’s live debut at the Middle East Upstairs on Thursday.

Brooklyn metal experimentalists Liturgy have been on the road this month with a killer pair of supporting acts in VA screamo band Infant Island and the great, nigh-unclassifiable Elizabeth Colour Wheel. That bill alone is cause for celebration, but last night’s Cambridge stop also paid host to the first-ever gig by local-ish supergroup Umbra Vitae, officially locking it up as a can’t-miss.

Infant Island opened the evening, showcasing a dynamic, post-rock-tinged spin on modern screamo that was both haunting and cathartically throat-shredding.

Elizabeth Colour Wheel were on next, putting on a performance art clinic and a blisteringly heavy set. There’s elements of shoegaze, black metal, dark ambient and a nasty strain of noise rock in the band’s cacophonous DNA, and you’re never quite sure where their songs (or their singer) are headed next. It’s a rock show with jump scares; an experience that keeps one considerably more on edge than your average. It’d been a number of years since I’d last caught the band, and I’m pleased to report they’ve lost none of their edge.

Up next, Umbra Vitae – the Jacob Bannon-fronted band who dropped their debut album in May 2020 and obviously didn’t get to tour it at the time – finally got to bring those songs to a crowd and a stage. Shadow of Life is a pretty good death-metal-core LP, but live is really where this group was meant to shine. Comprised of veteran players whose resumes include Hatebreed, The Red Chord and (of course) Converge, the fivesome knew how to work a crowd. They sounded great and their pummeling set sent plenty of bodies (including a Mosh Santa) moving.

Liturgy closed out the show in a more zen but no less arresting fashion. Led by singer and composer Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix, the project first came to prominence a decade ago as the rare sort of buzz-y black metal band to cross over into (somewhat controversially) appealing to an indie audience. They played one of the first Pitchfork Fests I attended, sounding like a hovering swarm of angry bees to my untrained ear from across a field. Years later, their maximalist avant-garde metal is still pushing buttons and genre boundaries. They have a double album on the way next spring, and they previewed a bit of that alongside tracks recent and not-so-recent in a hypnotic set on Thursday. They sounded incredibly dense, particularly for a guitars/bass/drums four-piece with a strikingly minimalistic gear array. Their set was all propulsive intensity, like closing your eyes and standing directly behind a jet engine. In a good way.

Check out photos from all four bands below.