Behemoth Destroys Toronto on the Godless IV Tour | Review

When I arrived, I was told fans had been lined up outside History since noon, nine hours before Behemoth would hit the stage, six hours before doors even opened. What nobody standing in that line knew yet was that the night was already complicated, two of the four bands on the bill, Rotting Christ and Immolation, weren’t going to make it. Their tour bus had broken down en route. History pushed doors from 5:30 to 6:00. For a show this stacked, that’s a long stretch of standing around trying not to let the disappointment settle in. Later, once Rotting Christ made it to the venue, too late to play but in the building, their merch table opened and the line for it told you everything about how much people had wanted that set.

Deicide

Deicide walked out at 7:45, did a quick sound check, and got into it. Whatever disappointment lingered from the missing sets disappeared the moment they started playing. And with the extra time created by two absent openers, they stretched the set by about 15 minutes and went deeper than they would have otherwise.

That meant Toronto got songs Montreal never did: “Carnage in the Temple of the Damned,” “Bury the Cross… With Your Christ,” “From Unknown Heights You Shall Fall,” “Holy Deception,” “Satan Spawn, the Caco-Daemon,” “In Hell I Burn” — none of those were on the standard bill.

Behemoth

At 9:15 the lights dropped and the chant started. Coordinated, loud, not letting up, ‘BE-HE-MOTH, BE-HE-MOTH,’ from a room that had been waiting since noon for this exact moment.

‘The Shadow Elite’ opened and the sound hit the way sound hits in History when the production is right, full, directed, physical. That room is built for this kind of show, and they use every inch of it. The backdrops, the LED stage lights shifting through reds and every colour in between, the stage dressed in the band’s iconography, History is genuinely one of the best rooms in the country for a show like this. Not every band can fill a space like that with the right energy. Behemoth always can.

Nergal came out in full corpse paint, beaded ceremonial necklaces stacked across his chest, and ran the show like someone who has been doing this for 35 years. ‘Ora Pro Nobis Lucifer’ hit second and the crowd responded hard, horns up, bodies moving, the floor finding its rhythm. ‘Blow Your Trumpets Gabriel’ came later and landed like something closer to a ritual than a performance, the lights breaking with the blastbeats in a way that made Inferno behind his Pearl kit look like a force of nature rather than a hired hand. The man is an absolute machine.

Before ‘Ecclesia Diabolica Catholica,’ Nergal called the room ‘the church’ and meant it. Then he asked for a show of hands from people seeing Behemoth for the first time, ‘where the fuck have you been for the last 35 years?’ and welcomed them alongside the lifers.

Earlier he’d talked about 2004. Opera House, opening for Suffocation. Strep throat. Inferno’s tooth killing him. Thirty people in the room. Twenty-two years of coming back to Canada and playing whatever room would have them. ‘I was questioning why the fuck we’re even here,’ he said. With 2,000 plus people going absolutely nuts, it was clear exactly why he kept coming back.

The Bathory Cover

Then Nergal stopped and said a little birdy had told him something, tapped his ear monitors, and announced that Sakis Tolis from Rotting Christ had made it to Toronto. Not in time to play a set, but in the building. And then he called him to the stage.

‘Sakis, you ready to sing with us? So let’s do some motherfucking cover of Bathory, the best band ever.’

‘The Return of Darkness and Evil.’ For everyone in that room who had shown up wearing a Rotting Christ shirt, who had driven from Niagara Falls or flown from Calgary to see a set that never happened, that moment landed. Covering Bathory is a statement on its own. Doing it with Tolis, on a night when his band’s set got wiped out by a broken-down bus, in front of a crowd that had been waiting all day, that’s the kind of thing you don’t plan.

The Closer

‘O Father O Satan O Sun!’ ended the night. During the finale the bass player jumped into the pit, wanting to be with the fans for the last song. Behemoth broke their Canadian attendance record on this night and Nergal called it the best show Behemoth had ever done in Canada. I was there. I’m not arguing.

A huge thanks to Caitlin from AtomSplitterPR for the accreditation.

Behemoth

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Drew Osborne

I’m Drew, the founder and editor of Front of the Stage. I have a strong love for music and photography, which started at a very young age. There’s just something I love about experiencing live music and capturing memories that will last a lifetime, and that’s how Front of the Stage came to be.