Posts Tagged ‘Blues’

Listen: ‘The Raven’ by Indica Blues

Posted: 15 December 2025 in Singles and EPs, Recommended Streams and Videos
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Born in the shadow of Oxford’s dreaming spires and forged in a haze of down-tuned amplifiers, UK heavyweights Indica Blues return in 2026 with their most ambitious and apocalyptic work to date. Their long-awaited new album, Universal Heat Death, will be released on January 31 via digital platforms and CD, marking the band’s first full-length since their critically acclaimed second album We Are Doomed.

To herald the album’s arrival, Indica Blues unveil their new single ‘The Raven’, a towering slab of blues-soaked doom that captures the band at their most urgent and expansive. Driven by crushing riffs, haunting dual-guitar interplay, and a foreboding atmosphere, the track sets the tone for an album obsessed with collapse, consequence, and the slow grind toward oblivion.

AA

Since forming in 2014, Indica Blues have carved out a formidable reputation as one of the UK’s most compelling psychedelic doom-stoner hybrids, once described as “bong-filling rock that is platinum heavy, but blessed with a melodic sensibility underneath it all.” Their sound, a molten blend of fuzz-drenched blues, doom, sludge, and psychedelic melancholy has earned them devoted fans worldwide and praise from both underground tastemakers and major publications.

Their previous album, We Are Doomed, received 4 stars in Kerrang!, reached No. 4 in the Doom Charts, and proved eerily prophetic: an apocalypse-themed record released just as the first wave of the global pandemic brought the world to a halt.

“We’re looking forward to touring Universal Heat Death*, and hope no cataclysmic world events stop us this time,” laughs bassist Andy Haines.

AA

cd8e924b-2b11-7b54-fcba-0143db308337

Zabus – Whores of Holyrood

Posted: 13 August 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , ,
0

12th August 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Zabus have been on fire lately, as their recent EP, Shadow Genesis, released in June. It’s not only the prolific output which is noteworthy – some acts spunk out new material every other week, but the quality simply isn’t there – but we’re looking at a creative purple patch of innovation and ideas flowing in full spate. Whores of Holyrood is their fifth full-length album in less than two years, and while Zabus is ordinarily a collective centred around project founder Jeremy Moore, Whores of Holyrood is the first ostensibly solo release by Moore under the moniker, and it’s also pitched as ‘one of the most overtly political statements from Zabus to date.’

This matters. Anyone with an outlet, or a platform, right now, has, a duty to state their position. Silence is complicity. We know this from history. Individually, there is next to nothing we can do to stop Trump’s fascistic march, or halt the genocide in Gaza, or stop the wat in Sudan. But fucking hell, we are witnessing hell on earth right now. To take a line from William Burroughs’ Exterminator, ‘There are no innocent bystanders … what are they doing there in the first place?’ I don’t necessarily entirely agree with the stance, but it’s worth unpacking a bit, particularly in the context of 2025, when people are more likely to film the most horrific events on their phones and post them on social media than to intervene. I know, people are scared and all the rest, but… something is deeply wrong.

The title, Whores of Holyrood, immediately made me think of the Scottish parliament, but it would appear that there is no connection or implication intended. Instead, the album ‘explores the positive feedback loop between fascist authoritarian rule and societal inaction, apathy and resignation. Holyrood is a metaphor for the established classist hierarchy which derives its strength and influence from our subjugation.’

As an aside, ‘rood’ is a middle English term with its origins in Saxon for the cross, and a rood screen was a feature of medieval churches, a carved wooden partition depicting the crucifixion. Whores of Holyrood may not have any direct or specific connection to these historical roots, but they still seem somewhat relevant, albeit tangentially.

It’s ‘Shadow Genesis’, the lead track from the recent EP that launches the album with its reverb-heavy blues guitar and gothic stylings, and it’s dark, brooding, but it’s nothing to the snarling lo-fo post-punk goth epic that is ‘Burn to Your Own Destruction’: six and a half minutes of echo-soaked guitar swirling beneath bombastic baritone vocals, while the tile track is commanding, archly gothic, but with murky black metal production values. The same is true of ‘A-YA Bullet V’, which brings the driving funk groove of Bauhaus at their best, while also pushing the experimentalism to the fore.

‘Cremation Psalm’ is a murky swagger, equal parts Nick Cave and The Volcanoes, and every track on this album is pure gold. The muffled, echo-heavy production is not a detriment, but an asset, accentuating the old-school vibe which is s integral to the experience.

‘Sod Martyr’ is dark, dark, dark, and sparse, and something about it calls to mind The Honolulu Mountain Daffodils, while ‘Strangers of Non-Being’ brings together goth and heavy psychedelia with the addition of low, slow drone

If the Shadow Genesis EP showcased a keen experimentalism, and a broad range of stylistic touchstones, then Whores of Holyrood takes it all to the next level. Zabus keep pushing forward, outward, onward. Right now, it seems there is no stopping them.

AA

a1395699222_10

World Sanguine Report – Songs From The Harbour

Posted: 29 April 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , ,
0

God Unknown Records – 25th April 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

A new album by World Sanguine Report is always something to pique the interest. The jazz-tinged avant-rock collective centred around Andrew Plummer, with longtime collaborators Matthew Bourne, Ruth Goller, and Will Glaser, has a knack of producing music that Does Something Different. In a world of mass-produced, off-the-shelf sameness, were even every ‘independent’ or self-professed ‘boutique’ business of any persuasion is simply a carbon copy of all the rest in their striving for Instagram perfection, this is welcome. Very welcome – even in their less accessible moments. Because all this endless sameness is brainrot.

A few years ago now, people started setting up independent burger places as a rebellion against the dominance of McDonalds, etc. But now there’s a hipster place doing smash burgers every few hundred yards, just as there’s an indie coffee place on every corner, and that’s great, but it’s total overkill. How much fucking coffee do we need?

In the early 00s, there was an oversaturation of post-rock. I can’t recall a time when we’ve ever been drowning in jazz-infused avant-rock, and while there are acts which stand by way of comparison when exploring their work, World Sanguine Report stand apart in a very open and sparsely-populated field. And for Songs From The Harbour, they’ve decided they need to do things a bit differently – just in case there was a risk of things getting a bit predictable.

They consider Songs From The Harbour ‘The most direct WSR album to date’. Plummer goes on to recall how ‘We auspiciously recorded the majority of the album aboard the Lightship 95 Studios on the Thames. The ship moved us, the ship moved with us. The Thames lapped at the boat, its tides washing in the Lightship’s echo chamber, housed in the hull of the ship, made its way into the recordings.’

London has a way of infiltrating the psyche and the creative mind of artists, in a way few other places do, other than perhaps New York. I digress. As usual.

‘Lay Down With Me’ makes for an interesting intro track: Less than two minutes log, it’s a low, slow, droner which leaves you pondering ‘where will this go from here?’ The answer is that will go deep, delving down and exploring difficult terrain. ‘She Is All’ is huge in its mere four minutes, with Plummer’s brooding baritone vocals resonating out over the space as reverb covers a crushing embrace. ‘Blue Skin’ finds Plummer brooding and musing, and sitting somewhere between late Leonard Cohen and Jim Morrison, only with a certain feel of despairing.

The same gloom hangs on the remainder of the album, with ‘Starboard’ not only clinging to the nautical theme of the album’s title, but sounding like a slightly inebriated sea funeral. ‘No Kids’ brings a slow, weary-sounding blues feel – and by weary, I mean fagged out, fatigued, it’s a knackered-sounding groan of a song, while the last song, the seven-minute ‘The Catching of the Bull’ rings out in a fuzzy-edged drift of melancholy with an almost sing-song back and forth with the dual vocals. It’s pretty and sad in equal measure, and leads the album out on an extended sonic cascade, like a slow incoming tide.

Songs From The Harbour is more bluesy and folky than jazz, and it’s also slow and weighty in its lugubrious mood. There’s a solidity to it, a coherence, and an assurance which radiates from its carefully-woven tapestry.

AA

a1542432635_10

Watch: ‘No Arrow’ by Lux Interna

Posted: 19 April 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
0

LUX INTERNA reveal the music video for the lush and warm track ‘No Arrow’ as the final advance single taken from the American dark folk innovators’ forthcoming new album New Wilderness Gospel, which is chalked up for release on May 2, 2025.

LUX INTERNA comment: “In ‘No Arrow’, a tangle of voices and moments meet, intertwine, and transform each other”, guitarist and singer Joshua Levi Ian explains on behalf of the band. “Here, it’s always 4:00 am. You’re stepping out of the roadside bar as the desert winds gently stipple flickering red neon with grains of sand, while the lights from the town in the valley shimmer below like ghosts in the darkness. Or perhaps you’re waking up in the Mojave heat and lighting a cigarette in the motel bed as you watch your sleeping lover bathed in shadows and the shards of electric light that creep in through the holes in the curtains. Or maybe you’re still driving, tired but full of flame, as the car’s headlights are continuously humbled by the vastness of a great nocturnal kingdom. Either way, you feel a mix of calm resolve and wildlife surging up inside you. Your body is awake, a beautiful animal of flesh and fire. It feels like everything that came before has intentionally led you to this moment. But you know that he’s out there, waiting and watching. And there’s a cold and calculating malice in his eyes. This thought used to terrify you. You would have done anything to shake him off your trail. But not anymore. Now you’re ready. You welcome the encounter. Now he’s the one that best beware.”

AA

bbcf112f-1d07-af27-3477-739d767e1e69

Noisepicker – The Earth Will Swallow The Sun

Posted: 20 March 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Exile On Mainstream – 21st March 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Noisepicker get a pass for a rather lame name by virtue of being absolutely phenomenal purveyors of noise rock, and that they are absolutely phenomenal purveyors of noise rock is a fact, not an opinion.

It’s also a fact that the album’s title, The Earth Will Swallow The Sun, is factually inaccurate. But again, they get a pass, not least of all because without Earth, there would be no Sunn O))) and the whole world of drone metal was born from Earth and the sun, or at least Sunn O))) revolve around that… but I digress. The Earth Will Swallow The Sun marks the return of Noisepicker after a seven-year break following the release of their debut, Peace Off, in 2018, because… life, apparently. This seems to be how it goes. Stuff happens, you get busy dealing with it, and simply doing everyday stuff, like laundry and life admin, and before you know it, shit, five years have evaporated, and that’s half a decade.

‘Do not expect neat, polished, note perfect, carefully constructed sound. Noisepicker are loud and abrasive. They pay homage to the genres which made them fall in love with music in the first place – doom, punk and blues – and bring it all together in a hearty and heavy concoction that is all their own.’, they forewarn, and yes, it’s all true. The Earth Will Swallow The Sun places texture and impact and density over palatability and accessibility. And that’s for the good: the world is engulfed in slick digital mass-produced music, and there seems to be something of a rebellion against it in underground circles, with artists with nothing to lose going all-out to splurge their souls with unapologetically raw output. And this is something that feels relatable, it’s music to connect with, because it’s real, immediate, direct, and without compromise. To listen to something so unfiltered is to feel alive.

The album starts sparse, with strong hints of Mark Lanegan, with Harry Armstrong delivering a heavy-timbred vocal croon that emanates from the chest and crackles in the throat, over a simple guitar strum and some anguished drones, until finally, almost two minutes in, it all kicks in with some big guitars, thudding drums, booming bass. It’s a hint at the potential energy that Noisepicker offer, and if opening an album with a slow-paced dredger of a song seems like an odd choice, it paves the way for some high-octane, high-impact racket, sliding immediately into the darkly chaotic snarl of raging riff-out roar of single cut ‘Chew’, which lurches and lumbers between grunge and metal and heavy psychedelia.

Things only get more intense from hereon in. ‘Tomorrow Lied the Devil’ is built around a solid blues-based boogie, but with everything cranked up to eleven and Armstrong giving it some gravel-throated grit while the guitars chug hard against thunderous percussion. ‘Leave Me the Name’ sees them coming on like Chris Rea not on the road to hell, but dragged up, charred and rotting from the depths of hell, and ‘What Did You Think Was Going to Happen’ is dense, dark, gnarly, menacing and lands like a punch to the gut. The riff is actually a bit Led Zep, but with so much distortion and a vocal that sounds like a death threat, it all takes on a quite different dimension, while ‘The End of Beginning’ is simply a slow but blistering assault. None of this is pretty, and none of this is gentle. All of it is strong, and rabid in its intensity. ‘Start the Flood’ offers some wild bass runs amidst the raving riff-driven mayhem – because we need for there to be more happening here. There’s some rabid raving about supernovas, and then the title track comes on like some deranged stoner rock blitzkrieg that has hints of Melvins and a megadose of daftness. We need that daftness as much as we need the guitar carnage. There’s a smoochy swagger to the blues / jazz-hued ‘Lorraine in Blood’ that’s like Tom Waits narrating a pulpy crime novel, before ‘Lunatics’ brings the album to a more experimental conclusion with its dominant crowd noise backing.

It’s rare for a side-project to stand above the main band, but Armstrong has his fingers in many pies beyond Orange Goblin, and Noisepicker are a rare entity in every way. The Earth Will Swallow The Sun is something else. It’s the sound of a pair of extremely capable musicians really testing themselves, and having fun in the process. It’s fun to listen to, too. Hard, and harrowing at times and in places, but ultimately fun.

AA

AA

420726

Emmaleen Tangleweed – Songs From The Unseen, The Unsaid and The Unborn / The Sun Will Still Shine When You Die

Posted: 9 February 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , ,
0

Cruel Nature Records – 21st February 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Sometimes, I find myself reading – and returning to – the write-up for an album and thinking ‘Yes: I’m going to like this… but perhaps not tonight. I don’t know if I’m ready or in the mood’. This immense release, which finds two previously-released album reissued as a single package consisting of seventeen pieces, by Namibian-born Emmaleen Tangleweed is one such example. Listening to new music daily doesn’t mean that writing about it is always easy, and sometimes, I find myself feeling daunted by the prospect, and asking myself ‘how could I do this justice?’

Here’s the preface, which accompanies the release on Bandcamp:

Emmaleen Tangleweed’s music is more accurately described as a channeling than a song. Summoning stories of lost souls too tortured to let go, she cries and yearns as they no longer can, and yet, a silver thread of faith binds them. Themes of death, relationship and lingering hope imbue the listener with an eerie feeling of communion, of conversing with souls who have crossed the great divide.

Painting a visionary picture for the listener the stories contain hidden characters and everyday dramas played out in a time capsule of song giving the words weight in the earthly as much as in the ethereal they are delicately plucked from.

There’s also the fact that I feel obliged to listen to a release the whole way through, uninterrupted, so as to experience it as intended, not as people dipping in and out and skipping through playlists do, meaning that two albums back-to-back is quite a commitment. Anyway.

Songs From the Unseen, The Unsaid And The Unborn (Tracks 1 – 8, 10) was originally self-released in November 2022, while The Sun Will Still Shine When You Die (Tracks 11 – 17) was again self-released in October the following year.

Listening to these simple yet hypnotic folk songs of Songs From the Unseen, The Unsaid And The Unborn, I find myself wondering if Tangleweed is really her name, in the same way I muse whenever I see someone wearing a coat from Jack Wolfskin. It would certainly be convenient if it was, because it’s a perfect match for the sparse but swampy blues of songs like ‘Screaming and Crying’ and ‘Bluebeard’. I also find myself thinking of early PJ Harvey – not because she was in any way blues, but because there’s something in the feel, the fact that it’s folk but not folk, blues but not blues, but not indie either. ‘3 Nights And 2 Days’, one of the shorter songs, is light in delivery, heavy in lyric, but the skipping, picked notes and easy groove are a joy.

Tangleweed’s voice is rich in timbre: not low but it has depths which imbue it with a gravity which in turn adds substance to the songs. And these are not short songs: Tangleweed spins out narratives over slow and steady acoustic strums running for five minutes at a time. But the time floats by.

The songs on The Sun Will Still Shine When You Die feel more considered, and are perhaps a few shades darker. Certainly, the seven-minute ‘Being Born’ is low, slow, epic in scope, and there are two songs – ‘Forever and Ever’ and ‘Lullaby for Lonely Nights’ – which stretch past eight minutes. The former balances a Leonard Cohen vibe with a more Beat-influenced spoken word approach. ‘Nice’ might not be quite the word, but it’s nicely done.

The arrangements – such as they are – are simple, the playing raw, immediate: it’s very like listening to the songs being played in a dimly-lit pub, with a room capacity of thirty, sitting on low stools around sticky circular tables with low chatter bubbling around as people go to the bar and pass observations. I have fond memories of many a night in pubs listening to some outstanding blues artists in my formative years, and I would say that my appreciation of live music really stems from these experiences. But it’s not solely for this reason that this release appeals: there’s something which resonates on a deeper level when it comes to heartfelt blues. It may be due to its timelessness. Wherever you go, whenever you go there, the blues is the blues, and it speaks to the soul. Tangleweed plays with honesty and without pretence, and the result is magic.

AA

a1995837137_10

Watch: ‘Mercy’ by Dichro

Posted: 27 May 2024 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
Tags: , , , , , , ,
0

Darkwave band, DICHRO has just unveiled their latest single & video, ‘Mercy’ from the forthcoming full-length album due out in August via Distortion Productions. The song carries a message that we should have mercy not just in our every day encounters, but free one another from judgement for choosing how to believe, if we believe, and what we believe. If we can start seeing one another with empathic eyes and hearts, perhaps we can rid our global atmosphere of so much fear and uncertainty. ‘Mercy’ is an outreach piece.

Says vocalist, Charmaine Freemonk: “We are reaching out to ask that everyone calm down a bit, take a breath, and be more conscientious of our actions. It is a heartfelt plea that we consider whether we are helping or harming one another, practice empathy, and if we cannot help, to at least not harm."

Check ‘Mercy’ here:

AA

9bbde47c-cda3-b1bb-7125-5b599cfb1855

Yosa Peit – Gut Buster

Posted: 25 April 2024 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
0

Fire Records – 26 April 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Another day, another artist I’m discovering and wondering if I’m increasingly poor at keeping up or of there really is just more music in the world than I could ever keep abreast of even if I devoted every waking minute to trawling every corner of the Internet for news and playlists. Maybe it’s a bit of both. There is, perhaps, something of an expectation that someone who writes about music should have a deep and wide-ranging knowledge of the subject. The trouble is, the more music you’re exposed to, the more avenues it opens up, and suddenly there’s this and this and this… and how is there time for all of it?

If you’re obsessive about a given genre, you may be an expert in your field, but you’re missing out on all of the other fields. Explore the other fields far and wide, and you’re missing something elsewhere. I see people on social media who seem to spend their entire days playing – usually streaming – new albums, and they’ve heard pretty much everything on release, five, six, seven albums a day. I’m rarely able to listen to music while working my dayjob, and when reviewing, I can’t really manage more than an album a night to hear, digest, process, formulate an opinion and sentences to articulate it.

In daily life, I rarely suffer from FOMO, but when it comes to music, I feel – increasingly -that I’m unable to keep up. I’ve not listened to the latest Taylor Swift album, for example. Or any of her albums for that matter. Am I missing out? My daughter would insist that I am. But as much as I listen to music for pleasure – at least when I can – I also listen with a view to providing coverage to artists who aren’t Taylor Swift, who you won’t find covered in every other publication. And so we come to Yosa Peit, who I clearly can’t claim to have discovered at the dawn of her career, but who, while having gained a following and a contract with Fire records, clearly isn’t a household name either.

The pitch for ‘The free-ranging sound of Yosa Peit’ is that her work ‘recalls the intense arrangements of a cyber-era Prince with the surrealist tones of Arthur Russell and the vulnerability of Arca circa 2017.’

I’m a little uncomfortable with Prince. By that I mean, likely somewhat controversially, I think he’s massively overrated, and moreover, I’m not really a fan of anything funk.

Perhaps it’s my relatively superficial knowledge of Prince that’s the reason that Prince is by no means my first point of reference on hearing Gut Buster, an album which is positively brimming exploding with ideas. There are elements of crisp pop and some bust-up, fucked about bluesiness to be found in the mix in this extravaganza of inventiveness, which also sculpts dark electropop shapes with some heavy bass and ethereal synths. At times, skitters and ripples rush by faster than the mind can compute, and there are some pretty slick grooves, even hints of what one might broadly refer to as ‘urban’ shades – as exemplified on ‘Tower Shower’, which also brings some dubby bass and blasting beats.

Gut Buster has soul – bit tosses it in a liquidizer and pulses it to a pulp with skittery bits and pieces of synth and hyper-processed vocals, 80s AOR melted into soporific trip-hop and hyperactive techno tropes. The chipmunk vocals area bit irksome at times, but there’s so much else that’s good that you can forgive it. The minimal gloop of ‘Call Me’ is a slow bump and scrape, and showcases the way in which Peit’s compositions are riven with intricate and fascinating detail.

Gut Buster is odd, quirky, in places dark and in others, less so. Unashamedly other and oddball, there is much to unravel here.

AA

383430

Watch: ‘Doom of Love’ by Knuckle

Posted: 26 January 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
0

Huddersfield garage rockers Knuckle have shared new single ‘Doom of Love’ taken from their upcoming second album Life’s a Bench, Then They Put Your Name On It. Due next month via beloved Wakefield DIY label Philophobia, the West Yorkshire DIY stalwarts follow-up to 2019’s ‘Life Is Hard When You’re Soft Inside’ will be released in February. Alongside the new single, Knuckle have shared news of a long run of dates between February and June this year, including headline shows in Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool and Sheffield.

A return to the scuzzy riffs and chaotic garage rock of their much-loved debut, ‘Doom of Love’ is a succinctly explained by singer Jonny Firth as being “a song about being scared to love somebody that’s in love with you, because you know one day you will fuck it up” and finds Knuckle at their raucous best. A slab of perfectly crafted confident and noisy rock music, Firth’s soaring vocals and a wonderfully unserious look at serious subjects.

Check the video here:

Made up of Jonny Firth, Ben Wallbanks and Rob Crisp, Knuckle have been working on their own clash of blistering intensity, massive riffs and tongue in cheek wordplay tackling issues near and dear to them for years, with hundreds of headline, supports and festival shows under their belts, the band released their debut album in 2019 to rave reviews, closing out the year with a massive headline show at Wakefield’s Warehouse 23 venue, documented by Long Division Festival.

Admitting to a slightly longer gap than anticipated between albums one and two, the trio have found life getting in the way since bursting onto the Huddersfield DIY scene. From getting married and starting families to launching t-shirt brands (Jonny Firth’s Wild West Yorkshire label) and standing on CWU picket lines (Drummer Ben Wallbanks is a postie supporting the strikes), the various members of Knuckle have poured all of this living and hard won experience into their second album – a raucous, gentle, crushing, hilarious and complex documentation of their own lives and those around them in Huddersfield.

Knuckle will be launching their new album at Wakefield’s Balne Lane Working Mens Club on Saturday 18th February.

Tour dates:

FEBRUARY

18 – Balne Lane Social Club, Wakefield

25 – The New Adelphi Club, Hull

MARCH

1 – Jacaranda Liverpool

2 – Oporto Leeds

3 – The Peer Hat, Manchester

8 – The Washington Sheffield

9 – Tom Pudding, Google

17 – The Grayston Unity, Halifax

APRIL

15 – West Riding, Dewsbury

JUNE

3rd – The Golden Lion, Todmorden

Knuckle

Knuckle – Credit: Emily Ryalls

REDFYRN / Beswick – The Vaults, York, 7th July 2022

Posted: 8 July 2022 in Live
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Christopher Nosnibor

Seems like gigs at the Vaults are cursed when I go. Just as headliners Witch of the East cancelled the last time I was down, so PAK40 have had to bail due to Covid. Yep, over two years on and it’s still having a significant impact on live music. But the good news is that REDFYRN are worth turning out for, as previous outings have shown, and even prior to PAK40’s withdrawal, it had the air of a double-header.

It’s fucking melting. I mean, I’m drinking cider, it’s that mafting. And I’m sweating it out faster than I can drink it. My skin is like a sieve or muslin bag. It must be absolutely punishing on stage.

Openers Beswick get off to a bit of a ragged start. But then, it is their first gig in three years, and they’re not looking like the kind of band who get tour-tight. It would be wrong to complain about the lack of guitar definition with a black metal band, and they lean towards the lower, slower end, where everything slips into a sludgy mid-range mesh, thanks to the five-string bass and seven-string guitar and the most fuckedest cymbal I’ve seen in use in a long time.

Bes 1Bes 2

Beswick

The main vocalist has three distinct styles: a penetrating, shivering squawk, a low growl, and a cleanish, atonal punk snarling shout, which actually works at least half of the time as they swing towards a dingy punk style at various points during the set. They do seem like a band in a bit of a stylistic quandary as they slither hither and thither, but they’re solid entertainment. The final song is a nod to their previous incarnation as Tokechamber, and sees the set conclude with billowing drone doom chords and feedback. I would have happily watched that for an hour.

REDFYRN start as they mean to go on, bringing the riffs slow and steady, with more five-string bass groove through an immense effects rack. The bassist has bounding energy, smashing every note with fists and feet, and the weighty guitars contrast with the soaring vocals. Big brave but stoner with a bluesy twist, chunky gritty riffs.

Red 1Red 2

REDFYRN

The solos aren’t overdone, and showcase the fact Cat Redfern is an excellent guitarist on a technical level as well as being a heavy hitter. She plays with only a handful of pedals, but a lot of crunch and a big dense sound and big volume.

A big hairy moshpit happened during the last song, and the half dozen beardy guys going crackers down the front was enough to bring the band back for one more, and they encore with ‘Unreal’, to an even more vibrant response. For a hot Thursday night when people would have likely been lured to a beer garden to toast the announcement of the Prime Minister’s departure, albeit at some time in the future, and for a stand-in headline slot, REDFYRN delivered a commanding performance and owned the night. Having only recently found themselves in headline slots, REDFYRN look ready to take it to the next level.

Older Entries