Maybe, maybe, 10 people stand in front of the White Rabbit stage when Necurat have finished tuning up, but that’s all right. It’s 8 p.m. on a Thursday. It’s not even completely dark outside, and this concert’s being billed as “A Night of Horror,” with four other equally evil-sounding groups (in addition to Necurat, Romanian for “dirty soul,” we’ve got An Angel’s Treason, Wraith, and, uh, possible David Allan Coe fans Fields of Stone). Horror’s not the kind of thing you usually get an early start on, is it?

Make an exception for these guys, though. Necurat’s MySpace page classifies their sound as a combination of death, black, and thrash metal, and they incorporate elements of each through the complex timing changes, fingertapped melodic solos, and punishing guttural vocals their subgenre mashup demands.

But Necurat don’t play so much like flexing tech wizards as skilled metal heads. The two rough-as-shit demos on their MySpace page — “Ritual of the Knife” and “Tongue of Thorns” — don’t do their live show justice, largely because they lack low end. In person, Tristan Gortician’s bludgeoning bass riffs and drummer Eric Thrash Hammer’s double-bass woodpeckery pound you into submission before Matt the Impaler’s hellish, schizophrenic growl (the Impaler channels several different malevolent beings, and none of them sounds like Cookie Monster) commands you to, well, honestly, I have no idea what he’s saying, but he could make his grocery list sound like a Cthulu cult ritual.

Against that backdrop, lead guitarist Jesse Carcharias’s assaults sound extra vicious.
Carcharias plays like a Stevie Ray Vaughn disciple turned to the dark side, unearthing ’80s-era blues-scale wankery to perform unspeakable acts upon it, but lest you think the rest of the band have him under some sort of spell, he’s got a wicked roar of his own, complementing the Impaler’s guitar chops (dude shreds and pinwheels his long hair simultaneously like a real pro). Either could probably front the band by himself (I’ve seen lots of bands working with much less), but their dueling guitar lines and occasional demonic duets (a full-blown studio version of their double-channel neuromancing in “Tongue of Thorns” might trigger actual insanity) give them the disorienting, overpowering authority that distinguishes most quality metal. Show up early next time. Necurat would sound scary good even in broad daylight. — Jeremy Martin