Looking at the Mass Grave

Excarnated Entity, Ascendency, Skatoscivus

Doomsday Veneration European Tour 2025 presented by Mortal Reward & Absurde Rituale at Café Carina, Vienna, Austria 20250423

I had never set foot in Café Carina before, even though it is right under the platform of the Josefstädter Straße station, a very frequented place in the Austrian capital. As I entered, I discovered a compact and more than welcoming venue; some would say perhaps a little too homely for a metal concert. And despite its technical sound limitations, the space held its own. By the time I arrived, Skatoscivus, a Viennese duo with really interesting musical ideas based on black and, above all, death metal, were already on stage. Certainly, while the absence of a bass guitar slightly diminished the heaviness of the band’s live sound, it did not overshadow their delivering of a dark, inventive, and polished show. Last year they released their first EP titled Abyssalorum, which is totally recommendable for the genre enthusiasts.

The second to take the stage was the Danish band Ascendency, who are accompanying Excarnated Entity across Europe’s 10th and 20th eastern longitudinal reaches. Offering a relentless performance of blackened death metal (or perhaps more accurately, deathened black metal), the group ignited intense headbanging from the audience.

As I have already confessed before, I have a particular weakness for doom metal. On this occasion, Excarnated Entity provided a good dose of doom alternated with really heavy and harsh death metal sections. Even tracks like “Carcinogen Shroud” could perhaps be categorised as brutal, dissonant, or even suffocating death/doom, as the tour’s promotional information states. And with this I also want to point out the virtual absence of the romantic or gothic tropes typical of doom/death. No mournful violins or poetic elegies here, just a relentless use of guttural vocals and lyrics steeped in a painful nihilism.

Worth noting is the artwork for Mass Grave Horizon (2023), their sole full-length album to date, which revisits the motif of the “doom walker” — the hopeless figure walking into the existential void well recognisable in the cover of classics such as Warning’s Watching From a Distance, Winter’s Into Darkness, or, more recently, in the EP Grieving at a Distance by Chile’s Mourners Lament (who, by the way, will be performing this year at Doom Over Vienna!). In the case of Excarnated Entity, the desperate walkers (apparently soldiers) are not alone but faceless pallbearers transporting a corpse to the mass grave.

Another relevant trope in Excarned Entity is the critique of religion, expressed above all through a crude analysis clearly framed in the mechanised violence of war. No redemption nor salvific epiphanies seem possible here. Rather, they appear to be involved as a myth that fuels the very cycles of atrocity. The last verses of “The Butcher’s Pulpit”, the climactic point of the evening, express this crystal clear:

The outstretched hand of salvation
Offers a blade to carve out your heart
Divinity and deception are one and the same

And both the heavens and earth are empty

To close, I will circle back to Café Carina’s briefly. Listening to a death/doom band of this caliber in such an intimate setting was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. Far from feeling cramped, the venue’s intimate atmosphere let every detail of the performance cut through. While the space has its technical limitations, that is maybe precisely where its charm lies —few venues make extreme metal feel this visceral and, at the same time, warm.