Batushka & Houle concert report, 28/09/2025

Cold snow meets industrial steel.

I’m a good bit later than I’d have liked in writing about this, but it’s no secret that life happens, and as much as I’d love to hunker down and spew word vomit for a couple of pages, I didn’t get the chance to. All the same, shows are still going on, and it’s hard to not attend at least some of them, as was the

case with Samael, who were supported by Likno (Λίκνο for the purists and language preservers), on November 8th, 2025.

Truth be told, I am wholly unacquainted with Samael’s work, let alone their 1994 classic Ceremony of Opposites, to which the tour is dedicated to. Nevertheless, I gave myself the courtesy of at least familiarising myself with that release, a rather atypical product of a time in black metal that saw the second wave hit its peak, while also splintering off into different directions. Turns out, it’s worthy of its status, although its insistence on mid-paced grooves with a penchant for dark melodies is definitely not for everyone, not to mention the industrial undercurrent running through the rhythm section. But alas, this is not a review of the record, although it might warrant a more extensive look, my aversion towards reviewing classics notwithstanding.

Contrary to last time, this show found me in familiar territory, as I had the pleasure of finally setting foot in the Eightball Club after a prolonged absence. Despite the Venn diagram of the crowds that visit places like the Eightball Club, Block 33, and Mylos being a near-perfect circle, I’ve always found myself feeling more “at home” in the former, owing to its smaller size and more communal vibe, since people oftentimes just hang out there without the pretence of a show taking place. The venue’s acoustics are also a huge plus, since it means I don’t have to wade through a booming wave of static in order to figure out what’s being played. There’s a slew of factors at play when it comes to the quality of sound at shows, and although I am a firm believer of the guy behind the mixing board being an additional band member, a venue lives and dies by its structure and how good said structure is at conducting sound. In short, things have got to sound good when it comes to experiencing music, regardless of context.

Funnily enough, our opening act, Likno, is very much defined by its low fidelity, at least in a studio context, so getting to hear the band breeze through some tunes off their debut is an interesting experience that begs the question of what the “definitive” way to listen to someone’s music is. Is the artist’s vision in its purest form when it has been committed to tape, or when they are able to perform it in an intimate setting for an audience? Where is the line between aesthetic choices and limitations (budgetary or otherwise) drawn when it comes to the creation of music? I found myself pondering all this over the course of their set, one composed of black metal that was rendered in the image of lo-fi legends such as Darkthrone, whose influence ran deep through every minute of the band’s set.  

I stumbled upon Likno earlier this year, not during what I’d call a particularly black metal time of my life (that one is always relegated to November), and even then, I was hard-pressed to spend any time with them. Not because I was lacking for it, but because I just found myself thoroughly unimpressed by their work. Like we’ve already established, it doesn’t look all that far from what has already been written into black metal’s canon, instead opting to try their hand at interpreting the writings therein. As they hadn’t released anything in the time between my listening to the album in March and the show, I was once again met with very simplistic tremolo picking and punky strumming that didn’t do all that much when it came to setting a mood, energetic as it might’ve been.

If anything, the more charming parts of the set were those that veered a little further away from the general feeling of “We really like Transilvanian Hunger you guys”, even though they were few and far in between. Stuff like the 10-minute-long instrumental “Still”, or the flute-guitar interplay on “Birth”, were some real flashes of creativity that didn’t quite hit the same in a recorded format. An acquaintance of mine who was at the show described their set as

“white noise”, which I can’t argue against. If anything, I am more interested in whether there is merit in black metal of this sort to wash over you, providing an almost meditative experience that is less focused on compositional quality, and more on tone and atmosphere, at least in a live setting. I’ve never been all that averse to more ambient types of music, but when it comes to metal, and particularly seeing bands live, I want to feel something, or at the very least be immersed into what they play. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to be enveloped by this time around. While the aforementioned Darkthrone did at times fall into a state of white noise, it was always backed by compositional skill that wielded its simplicity as a tool to lull you into a trance-like state, rather than one of boredom. Admittedly, this approach was at the time also backed by its freshness at the time, so seeing its impact diminished when bands 30 years down the line try to emulate that sound could be chalked up to being born at the “wrong” time. Then again, finding a creative outlet through which one can express themselves is always a pleasant sight to see, even if it is done without straying from a well-trodden path.

 

Homie popped off on the flute, I'm not even going to pretend otherwise. 

Thankfully, all that changed when Samael took the stage. Following a brief electronic ditty being played on the speakers, the Swiss quartet rose to the stage and surgically worked their way through Ceremony of Opposites, all while riling up the crowd between tracks. Unsurprisingly, the crowd was all-in from the moment the first notes of “Black Trip” rang through the venue, and managed to maintain this level of excitement throughout, including on heavy hitters such as the anthemic “Baphomet’s Throne” and my personal favourite, “To Our Martyrs”, whose roiling rhythms had a high chance of dislocating a spinal disc or two. Although the album wasn’t recorded with being played live in mind, serving at the time as an exploration of one of black metal’s many (now well-established) facets, it would be hard to deny that metal with riffs as taut as this is meant to induce headbanging live. The industrial rigidity of the percussion creates a pulse that pulls you in on tracks like “‘Till We Meet Again”, which keeps you in suspension with its stop-start rhythms, especially in conjunction with the symphonic backing that looms in the distance. In cases such as “Flagellation” though, that pulse becomes far more pounding, turning the whole song into a chugging jackhammer that only leaves room for the vocals and some synth melodies. For all its simplicity, the band does quite a bit with the tools they’re provided with, and the creativity displayed through the percussion is a big part of that.

As we’ve already established, there weren’t many embellishments on the tracks, everything ran like clockwork (they are Swiss after all), although there was one particular novelty for me present during the set, that being their usage of a drum machine. It’s no secret that Samael has employed it on most of their output, but this was their last release to feature a physical drumkit. As such, I found myself wanting on that front, as having Xytras sit behind a desk for most of the show took a little away from the live experience, especially when the rest of the members were providing a very lively performance. That being said, there was the added novelty of having a standing drumset of all things, something that they unfortunately didn’t employ as much as I would’ve liked.

Seeing as a full playthrough of Ceremony of Opposites only takes 35 minutes, that leaves us with the second half of their set, featuring a lot of the band’s “classic” tunes from throughout their discography. It is here that I must confess that I am wholly unfamiliar with most of Samael’s output besides the aforementioned album, and know very little about them besides their transition into electronic/industrial metal, a genre that I am not particularly fond of. So you can imagine that when the second half kicked off with tracks like “Rain” and “Slavocracy”, the rigid and mechanical chugging left me cold, with nary a good, or at least catchy, riff, to be seen on the horizon. 

 

Credit where it's due, he was banging the hell out of his kit whenever he did it. 

 

It was at this point that I braced myself for a total slog, albeit one that I was thoroughly committed to, on the grounds of having paid for it. Thankfully, not only did they play a vintage tune such as “…Until the Chaos”, which is far closer to what I am accustomed to from the band, but they actually had a couple of catchy industrial tunes at their disposal, such as “Black Supremacy”, whose simplistic chorus actually works in an almost mantra-like fashion, especially in a live setting.

The true standout of this part of the set though was the band’s newest single, “Black Matter Manifesto”, a distinctly blackened take on industrial metal with pounding tremolo riffs, and some huge choirs in the background. The pace was unrelenting, and it jerked me out of the stupor the clunkers mentioned two paragraphs ago put me in, and assuaged my worries

about how the rest of the set would go. Good thing that the better industrial tunes followed, as well as the aforementioned “...Until the Chaos”, which was the lone representative of the band’s pre-Ceremony output, for better or worse.

Ultimately, the experience was worth the price of admission, even if I didn’t find myself losing my mind over the sets in the same way I did with Batushka and Houle back in September. Getting to experience albums played in full is always a treat, especially when said album is a classic, and I’d be lying if I said I was wholly unappreciative of the food for thought Likno’s set provided me with. The more time passes, I begin to think about music in ways that have less to do with things like composition, production, and observing it live, besides giving me a jolt of energy, provides me with some additional insight into what makes things click for me. Is it just the riffs going hard, does it evoke particular emotions, is it catchy? There’s a slew of factors at play when it comes to how and why one appreciates music, and the live experience is but one facet of that, albeit one that I’ve been approaching in a different way than I used to. Might be because of the neck problems that I’m ever so persistently chasing after by listening to the stuff I do, who knows.