Cursed to Live

Under normal circumstances, the release of a very belated live album by German death metal icons Morgoth would smack of a desperate vault-cleaning project for the group's longtime label, Century Media, but because 2012's Cursed to Live actually carries a performance captured just one year earlier, celebration is the only reasonable circumstance in play here. Like most of the reconstituted band's select reunion appearances since 2009, this one took place in a festival setting (Germany's Way of Darkness Festival, to be exact), before an improbably large and uniformly supportive audience that ironically put Morgoth's modest '90s fan base to shame, but then death metal has come a long way since then. So too, obviously, have the remaining original bandmembers, vocalist Marc Grewe, guitarists Harold Busse, and Sebastian Swart, yet you wouldn't know it from the blistering attitude and youthful violence with which they tackle their now classic material alongside new recruits Sotiros Kelekides (bass) and Markus Reincke (drums, ex-Destruction). Aided and abetted by virtually impeccable sound (likely cleaned up in the studio after the fact, but who really cares in this Milli Vanilli world?), ancient favorites like "Pits of Utumno," "Selected Killing," "Body Count," and "Resistance" virtually leap off the speakers into mosh pits of the mind's eye; their thrash-infused energy marking Morgoth's territory at the very foundations of death metal's inexorable rise. (Wisely, 1996's alternative metal swan song, Feel Sorry for the Fanatic, is given a wide birth.) And, like other ancient titans of the style -- Death, Sepultura, Morbid Angel, et al -- Morgoth show via the sheer power and confidence of this middle-aged rebirth what kind of balls it took to leave one's mark in those unforgiving early years. None of these bands were messing around, and neither does Cursed to Live. ~ Eduardo Rivadavia|