Posts Tagged ‘Irk’

Irk / Algernon Cornelius / Care Home – Wharf Chambers, Leeds, 24th January 2025

Posted: 25 January 2026 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

Irk (not to be mistaken for Lancastrian newcomers Irked) certainly took their time over their second album, so the fact their playing its launch gig four months after its release is fitting.

The last time I saw them would have been 2018, in the now-defunct CHUNK, alongside Britney and Beige Palace (also now sadly departed), at the launch of debut album. Back then, CHUNK – a fairly basic rehearsal space which also hosted gigs – was the hub of an emerging DIY scene which spawned a bunch of noisy bands who emerged in the wake of the likes of Blacklisters, Hawk Eyes, That Fucking Tank. Fortunately, the Leeds scene is resilient and continues to thrive with new spaces and new bands popping up – and Irk are still here, despite geographical dispersal and general life stuff like jobs and families doing little to boost the time and energy available for creative work.

One of the new bands to have emerged more recently is Care Home. Care Home no doubt won themselves some new fans when they landed the coveted slot of supporting the Jesus Lizard last January. Tonight they’re a late substitute for Blacklisters, who were admittedly, an additional draw for tonight, but it’s hard to be too disappointed with the choice of replacement, kicking the night off in suitably noisy fashion. The interplay between the guitar and synths works well and affords them a greater range when it comes to the arrangements. The bass work alternates between a stop/start jolting and insistent solid four-four groove, and when paired with some busy, beat on every beat drumming, they’ve got a sturdy spine around which everything else hangs nicely. The vocals are straight-up, unpretty (post) hardcore shouting, an effluence of nihilism in t vein of Kowloon Walled City.

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Care Home

Algernon Cornelius proved to be an inspired choice, breaking up a rock-orientated bill with some highly inventive and energetic hip-hop. Pulling together a truly visionary array of sources, spanning jazz, punk, and metal and even sampling a Beige Palace song, it’s all going on during his lively set.

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Algernon Cornelius

Irk’s set is a squalling blast of noise from beginning to end. The bass is simply immense. Recorded, it’s not immediately apparent that the sole instrumentation is drums and bass – and not only because various guests add additional detail in various form, but this means that on stage, the fact they blast out such a dense racket with so little only accentuates the impact. But that bass… the sound is pretty varied and big on texture, from the rib-rattling mid-range, compressed sound which resembled tearing cardboard to the bowel-quivering low-end, there’s substantial range. Meanwhile, Jack Gordon hollers and howls through a host of effects and distortion, and this show – like the album itself – was worth the wait.

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Irk

With ‘The Seeing House’, they’ve really honed things and learned the benefits of shifting tempo and tone: ‘Eating All of the Apple’ is the perfect example of how they’ve absorbed the sparser, joltier aspects of Shellac’s output on board. Gordon’s vocal has more range, too, veering toward more gothic territory. And still they slam forth colossal riffs, paired with meaty beats and rabid yowling.

But for a serious band, they just can’t do serious when it comes to their shows: there’s a comedic elements to Gordon’s delivery and postures, not to mention the chat between songs, where he would take time to share wisdom he had discovered on that Internet from the mini-ons, printouts of which he would hand out to members of the audience.

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Irk

There’s something so, so quintessentially Leeds about Irk – quirky, self-effacing, a disparity between the abrasive noise and the affable nature of the people themselves – and they are genuinely nice guys. But this is so often the case: the music is the outlet. And the atmosphere tonight is one of warmth, of camaraderie. A lot of people know one another. This isn’t a scene in the sense of posing, self-importance or smugness, but one defined by camaraderie and mutual appreciation.

Irk’s set was punchy and abrasive, delivering fifty minutes of intensity interspersed with comedy, making for an event which felt like the perfect launch for the album. And I shall treasure my numbered, annotated minion forever.

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Platitude Queen – Forebears

Posted: 22 August 2020 in Albums
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14th August 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

Amongst the fermenting foment that is the melting pot of the Leeds alternative scene, J. S. Gordon, or Jack as he’s also known, is one of those people who’s to be found ambulating the underground circuit around the rehearsal space and indie venue CHUNK with noisemongers IRK. His Platitude Queen vehicle represents a less frenetic, splenetic kind of sound: a ‘contemplation on cultural heritage’, it’s pitched as an album which fits ‘the wider traditions of folk music’ while crossing into ‘the world of hauntology’.

In liner notes fitting for a philosophy graduate, Gordon unpacks the idea behind the album:

‘The form of hauntology which besieges this collection of songs is one that lurches from the depths of the past, but also recognises the (lack of) future. The traditional view of hauntology (as per Jacques Derrida) is that the present is haunted by persistent recurrence of concepts and ideas from the past. The discomfort lies in the fact that these concepts, these ghosts, do not properly belong to the past, and the observer who connects with these ghosts is therefore also removed from a common sense view of time. We are therefore forced to remove our expectations of causality and the origins on these concepts, before they “returned” as ghosts.’

In its continual plundering of the past and the immense fiscal value of the nostalgia industry, in which a collective yearning for even the most recent past has scope for commodification, Postmodernism is in some sense built on hauntology, and in its endless recycling of the past, whether through a contemporary filter or a fashionable dash of retro chic, we find ourselves in a present where the future is doomed to remain mired in the past, while at the same time any real sense of history is dismantled by an all-encompassing simultaneity. As such, everything is rootless, as fragmentary echoes of all things past reverberate around us. And so we come to Forebears.

Forebears certainly presents an intriguing aspect on what you may categorise as hauntological folk: often wonky, always sketchy, and curiously evocative, if not necessarily unheimlich in its evocativeness.

The first song, ‘Sambucus’ is sparse and lo-fi, an acoustic piece that rumbles and mumbles like a Silver Jews outtake, wistful melancholy and off-the-cuff. The stomping ‘Dance of the Mummers’ s quite a contrast, a kind of folk-punk Cossack shanty, but as if played by Trumans Water on acoustic guitars. If that description sounds addled and vague, then it’s probably about right in conveying the strange atmosphere of the album. Everything calls to mind something else, something just beyond the ken of recognisance.

‘Hob Headless’ introduces an almost country tint, and ‘Pignut’ comes on like a wonky, vibrant and wholly irreverent collision between Pavement and The Pixies, unplugged. The eight-and-a-half-minute ‘Peg Powler’ is stark and lugubrious, some Leonard Cohenesque acoustic picking growing to some layered splendour and a slow surge of tension. Forebears, then, isn’t short on intriguing moments, or, indeed, quality songs that hang suspended in an indefinable time all of their own.

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Thank – Think Less

Posted: 4 July 2019 in Singles and EPs
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Buzzhowl Records / EXAG

I caught Thank way back in December 2016, supporting Oozing Wound at The Brudenell in December 2016. Having a gig to review never fails as an excuse to leave a works night out early: it’s up there with a family emergency, only way cooler. Obviously, working with a bunch of straights who listen to whatever’s on the radio and have next to no concept of ‘alternative’, the sphere in which I exist and the music which is the focus of my ‘other’ job is completely beyond them,

The review of that night described Thank as something of a ‘“supergroup” collaboration between members of various bands, including Irk and Super Luxury’, clocking Irk’s front man Jack Gordon on drums, and Freddy Vinehill-Cliffe, bassist with Beige Palace, providing off-kilter vocals. And a lot of Day-Glo. On reflection, it’s probable that not a single member of Thank had been born when Day-Go was all the rage first time around. I remember my eye-watering acid yellow tennis socks with fondness. As I also now remember that show, meaning that a new release is most welcome.

‘Think Less’ prefaces the arrival of their second EP, ‘Please’, set for release in October, and finds another Leeds noise luminary, Theo Gowans adopt a permanent place in the latest lineup. It’s a wild frenzy of lo-budget industrial funk that throws together Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle and early Nine Inch Nails into a blender, tossing in a messy vocal with an unashamedly northern accent and spraying the resultant snarling mess all over a chunky and deeply infectious cyclical groove that’s an instant earworm. Raw, ragged, jagged and all the better because of it, it’s cause to get excited.

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Thank - Please

Irk / Britney / Beige Palace – Chunk, Leeds, 7th December 2018

Posted: 8 December 2018 in Live
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Christopher Nosnibor

My appreciation of the debut album by Leeds noisemongers Irk is already out in the public domain, as is my admiration of their capacity as a live act. It was only fitting that they should launch their debut album at Chunk, the rehearsal space which has become the hub of the new Leeds underground / alternative scene which has begun to emerge since the Brudenell – still the best venue in the country – has become increasingly popular and catering ever more to bigger-name acts. And there’s no escaping the fact that without the tiny venues, the microscenes, the free and cheap spaces where anything goes, there’d be nowhere for the bands of the future to explore and develop ideas free from the limitations of marketability and the pressure to achieve success. Commercialism strangles creativity, and we need the obscure band who want to fuck shit up more than ever in these desperate times in the stranglehold of corrupt, constricting neoliberalist capitalism which is not-so-slowly eroding every real freedom for the ordinary person.

Chunk is so no-budget, so DIY that there’s no licence for tonight’s (free) event: its BYOB, and people file in with carrier bags containing four-packs and the atmosphere is just so laid back that my anxieties about finding the place (Chunk is hidden through a door up some steps (which I worry I may fall down on my way out) next to a car repair place in an industrial area two miles out into the arse-end of nowhere) and all of the other stuff I panic about but tend not to talk about evaporate almost immediately. There are friendly faces, faces I recognise, faces I can chat to, and it feels more like a house party than a gig.

Only, there’s a gig PA and there are bands, and Beige Palace are on first. I note that they’ve been using a quite from a review I wrote of their live debut on my only previous visit to Chunk in the summer of 2016, which says ‘Beige Palace make sparse-sounding music that’s jarring, dissonant and hints at a clash between early Pram and No Wave angularity.’ Two yeas on, it still seems a fair summary. ‘It’s not math-rock’, their diminutive and moustachioed front man, Freddy Vinehill-Clifee forewarns the audience before they begin their set. He’s right. It’s atonal, droney, repetitive noise-rock with an almost spoken word delivery. Kelly Bishop’s flat, elongated vowels are reminiscent of Mark E. Smith in the early years of The Fall. They’re bursting with nagging, awkward guitar lines and clattering percussion playing unusual time signatures, too. So, like math-rock, only not. Or something. But it’s not about labels, but the music, and while they’re still rough ‘n’ ready, their confidence and intuition has evolved a lot over the last two years, and they turn in a more than decent performance.

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Beige Palace

It was the release of BRITN3Y that brought deranged Edinburgh 3-piece Britney to my attention, and I’d been itching to see them live ever since. They don’t disappoint. Comprising bass – through a fuckload of pedals; vocals – through an even bigger fuckload of pedals; – and drums, they deliver sonic riots in the form of blistering sub-two-minute noisefests. Occasionally, chuggy riffs and even grooves emerge from the screaming, spasmodic mess, albeit fleetingly. It hurts after two songs. It hurts a whole lot better after ten. The speaker a foot from my right ear is sounding like it’s fucked and they just fuck it harder with a relentless barrage of explosive, brutal hybridized noise that draws on elements of metal, hardcore, and grindcore and Final Fantasy (the victory fanfare is a recurrent feature throughout their set and closes it, too, while the infamous Tidus Laugh from FF X also features). They’re joined at the end by NALA for some screaming vocals to wrap up set appropriately culminates in an ear-splitting wall of noise, and I’m not the only one blown away.

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Britney

It turns out that Jack Gordon still has the copy of The Rage Monologues from the time we exchanged books. He’s read my review of the album, and during our brief exchange, I’m reminded that so many of the people who make art that pushes extremities, in whatever way, are the most pleasant, polite, and mild-mannered people you could wish to meet. It’s their outlet, and it’s what keeps them sane. Better to make brutal art than commit mass murder. Probably. Jack – bespectacled, sporting jacket and chinos and looking like any other smart-casual office worker – is a nice guy. But with the aid of a PA, a backline, and a bottle of Buckfast, he brings the brutality.

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Irk

If the disappearance of Blacklisters from the Leeds scene following Billy Mason-Wood’s departure for Germany left a jagged, gaping hole, then Irk more than manage it fill it with their own rendition of that Jesus Lizard, Touch ‘n’ Go skewed 90s US noise-rock racket. The trio are quite a different proposition and are very much their own people, but the comparisons and local lineage are impossible to ignore. And in this enclosed space, with the volume at pulverising levels and the warmth of community and camaraderie only adding to that of the proximity of bodies, everything comes together perfectly.

Irk – Recipes from the Bible

Posted: 7 November 2018 in Albums
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7th December 2018

Christopher Nosnibor

Irk have been tearing it up on the Leeds scene for a little while now, and are a band at the epicentre of the DIY scene surrounding the CHUNK studio / rehearsal room space, tucked away in a rough and dilapidated industrial estate a good half-hour hike out of the city centre. It’s an apposite location for the thriving creative community of metal / sludge / noise bands.

The band describe themselves as ‘three polite wee rascals…. who make ugly, angular, noise-fused, math rock, consisting of drums, bass, and vocals’, and as such, belong to the city’s now well-established post-millennium tradition for producing seriously noisy bands who are bloody good. Many have fallen by the wayside, but a lineage of acts that includes Blacklisters, Hawk Eyes, That Fucking Tank, Holy State, Hora Douse, and yes, we’ll throw in Pulled Apart by Horses here, because they’re hardy quiet or genteel, speaks for itself.

I’ve caught them live a few times in the last couple of years, and have even performed on the same bill, exchanging books with front man Jack (I think Life Pervert is ace; I’ve no idea what he makes of The Rage Monologues). I’ve never once been disappointed by their performances, and it’s a reasonable expectation that Recipes from the Bible should sound like the work of a band who’ve been honing their material live for some time.

But by Christ, Irk really give it some here, and forge the title: this is a sonic concoction that cooks up the most unholy racket going. ‘I Bleed Horses’ begins with a howl and a barrage of frenetic drums and a mass of guitar racket. While you’re picking your jaw off the floor, check that tight, compressed, springy bass sound and the churning throb it produces that just about holds the whole squalling mess of discord together. Less that two and a half minutes in duration, the bled horses bleed out into ‘Life Changing Porno’, another unintelligible blizzard of noise that’s so chaotic it’s not always entirely clear if they’re all playing the same song: the tempo lurches unpredictably and whole racket collides in a spectacularly ugly explosion.

The seven-minute ‘The Observatory’ built around a choppy, cyclical riff reminiscent of Bleach era Nirvana, and again, it’s the menacing bass that dominates as they forge a suffocatingly claustrophobic density. It’s about as close to respite as it gets: with the only other exception being the verses of the lumbering ‘The Healer’, Recipes from the Bible is relentless in its screaming mania and brutal angles. The wild sax action on ‘You’re My Germ’ could be free jazz in another context, but here, it just adds another level of crazed hysteria to the mix.

Taking obvious cues from Shellac and Blacklisters, it’s a set of sharp-cornered, serrated brutality that stops, starts, shudders, judders, jolts and jerks – but unlike Shellac, Jack’s raving, gibbering, rabid vocals break free from the tight limits of the coiled tension of math-rock tropes and instead cut loose and careen into the wild noise of The Jesus Lizard. Snarling, howling, drawling and slavering, there’s something cracked, even psychotic. In combination, it’s a tense, intense set that sound deranged, dangerous: at times, its really quite uncomfortable. That’s a clear measure of success.

Chances are, reviews will tout this as being ‘uncompromising’, not least of all on account of it’s being self-produced by the band (of course). But Recipes from the Bible goes beyond that. Way beyond. It harnesses the full force of the band: so often, bands draft in producers only for the sound to be polished, slickened, rendered overtly ‘studio’. By keeping things in-house, they’ve retained the rawness, and the sheer velocity and unbridled power that defined them, and the sonic vision remains unadulterated. And beneath all of distortion and dirt, the ragged, jagged edges and the feel of a style of playing that’s loose and uncontained, there’s a remarkable and deceptive degree of precision.

It’s hard to find fault with Recipes from the Bible: there isn’t a weak track or an ounce of fat. There’s no filler, and no slack. There’s not a moment of tameness or timidity, and instead, they bring top-level ferocity and relentless fury, and the chances are you’ll be hard-pushed to find a better noise-rock album this year.

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Irk - Recipes

Watch: ‘Spectre at the Fiesta’ by Irk

Posted: 5 October 2018 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Leeds based noise-rock outfit Irk have announced details of their debut album ‘Recipes from The Bible’ which will be released on 7th December. They’ve also shared an 8-bit styled video for ‘Spectre At the Fiesta’ created by PSTL CSTL, which you can watch here:

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Irk

Irk / Super Luxury / Fawn Spots / Christopher Nosnibor + Legion of Swine / Neuschlaufen – The Fulford Arms, York, 16th July 2016

Posted: 20 July 2016 in Live
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Christopher Nosnibor

Is it wrong to review an event you’ve participated in as a performing artist? Very probably, but in the scheme of things, and in the current global socio-political climate, a minor display of poor etiquette really doesn’t amount to anything. Besides, this is more about what I – as a writer, reviewer, artist and site editor – believe to be the primary function of running a site dedicated to the coverage of non-mainstream music, namely to give artists and acts I believe in exposure. At times, focusing on a niche – albeit a pretty eclectic niche – feels like the audience are likeminded obscurists but I like to think there are things for those likeminded obscurists to discover here. So. I landed a spot initially to provide a spoken-word interlude to some bands – bands I like. The night before the gig, this evolved into a collaboration with one of the bands, one-man experimental noise act Legion of Swine. It was something I’ve wanted to do for ages.

So I rocked up while the soundchecks were getting going to discuss what we were going to do. The little pub venue was bursting with more kit than many all-dayers and everything was pointing to this being one loud night before anyone even got plugged in.

And the lineup! Five acts, three (and a half) over from Leeds for a measly three quid? You have to hand it to both the venue and first-time booker Jim Osman for the wild ambition here. There’s so much that could go wrong.

Neuschlaufen are only just soundchecking fifteen minutes after they’re due to play, and their bassist, Ash, has to be out and on his way to another gig by 7:45. Yet somehow they manage to pull it together and are churning out their heavy, hypnotic grooves in next to no time. Ash Sagar’s hefty, Jah Wobble-esque basslines boom out, underpinned by Jason Wilson’s uncluttered drumming. In cominationm they provide  a solid base for John Tuffen’s textured guitars, and while the set may be short, it builds nicely, going beyond Krautrock and into territories as yet unexplored.

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Neuschlaufen

Immediately after, everyone vacates to cool down in the car park, with its impressive beach art installation. It also serves as a sandy area where people can go and sit and smoke and buy cocktails and stuff and pretend they’re not in a car park in a city pub.

Consequently, I began spouting my first rage monologue (a recent piece entitled ‘Ambition’, if anyone’s interested) to an audience numbering half a dozen (plus sound man and bar staff), but – probably for the first time in the years I’ve been performing – people began to filter into the room by the time I left Legion of Swine to run the set to its natural conclusion of feedback and bewilderment (what other response is there to a man in a pig’s head and lab coat, ambulating the space with a condenser mic taped to his face and a battery-powered 3W Orange amp to his ear?) there was a substantial crowd. Most of them were confused, and more interested in the spectacle than necessarily enjoying watching a 40-year-old man spew vitriol and expletives into a mic, but I had an absolute blast. Literature is the original rock ‘n’ roll and the new rock ‘n’ roll, and the footage of the performance, for which I can take no credit whatsoever, is outstanding.

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Legion of Swine

https://player.vimeo.com/video/175067654

 

One of the benefits of being lower down the bill is that it’s possible to kick back, drink beer and watch the other acts, and while the temperature was steadily rising, it was a joy to sup a cool pint and listen to Fawn Spots road test a set based on their upcoming second album. I‘ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen these guys since they started out as a snotty York-based two-piece and it’s been a source of pride to witness their evolution to a Leeds-based four-piece with a debut album on Fire Records. Their hard-gigging work ethic is admirable, and they’ve got both songs and attitude. If the new material showcased tonight is a little less frenetic than the older stuff, it’s no less intense, and there’s every indication that album number two will be a stormer.

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Fawn Spots

It’s a little over a year since I saw Super Luxury play. Supporting Oozing Wound at the Key Club in Leeds, I’d been impressed by the power of their performance. However, as their gig photos and the anecdote I’d heard from a friend about front man Adam Nodwell delivering vocals for a large portion of a set from inside a box on stage, it seems they’ve been evolving the performance aspect of their show. They pulled out all the stops for this one, Nodwell arriving on stage cowelled in a hooded cloak, stripping it off to reveal some crazy man/badger legs thing that simply looked wrong. With confetti guns bursting all over and crowd-surfing and a general air of crazed mayhem, you might think the music was taking a back seat. But you’d think wrong: with enough back-line to shake a venue three times to size to its foundations, they blasted through a ferocious set with terrifying vigour and psychopathic precision. They may be zany in their presentation, but when it comes to the songs and slamming them in hard, they’re entirely serious.

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Super Luxury

Irk are pretty fucking serious, too. It’s barely been a fortnight since I caught their set in Manchester supporting Berlin’s heads, and while they were pretty ripping them, tonight they really do take things to another level. Of course, when I previously stated that they sound like fellow Leeds band Blacklisters, I meant it as a compliment: Blacklisters are one of my favourite bands of recent years. They’ve delivered two gut-wrenchingly hefty albums and are one of the most consistent live acts you’ll find. But it’s on this outing that I first truly appreciate Irk in their own right as the drum / bass / vocal trio lumber, lurch and piledrive their way through a full-throttle set. Jack Gordon – an affable, articulate chap off stage – comes on like a man possessed, hurling himself about the low stage amid crushing bass riffs and powerhouse percussion. While the power trio format is often lionised as the optimal band configuration, there’s even less room to hide when there are only two instruments and a vocalist. And so it is that Irk are tight as hell and double the intensity of the playing to compensate the absence of instruments and bodies on stage. In contrast to Super Luxury, here’s little by way of over showmanship on display here, and instead it’s all about whipping up a blistering intensity through directness and unadulterated force.

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Irk

With not a weak act on the jam-packed, super-value bill, and every act giving every last drop of juice to their performance, this is going to stand as one of the gigs of the year. The venue may not have been packed to capacity, but there’s no question that those who were there will be talking about it. That’s precisely how legends are made, and I’d wager that that at some point in the future, tonight will go down as one of those landmark events. And if I’m wrong… fuck it, it was a great night.

Heads. / Mums / Irk / Pijn – Gullivers, Manchester 28th June 2016

Posted: 30 June 2016 in Live
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Christopher Nosnibor

With an evening to fill in Manchester, the offer of four bands, including one I already know to be good, at a venue five minutes from my hotel was always going to be a winner. Unsurprisingly, it proved to be the right decision: Gullivers is in fact a decent pub, with five hand-pumps offering a selection of local brewery, JW Lees’ brews, and an upstairs room which is a perfect small gig venue: rectangular, dark, with a high stage and a well-proportioned PA installed.

First band up, Pijn (seemingly pronounced ‘pine’ although variant pronunciations emerge through the evening, mostly sounding like ‘pigeon’, and the band don’t seem too fussed) are a local three-piece. And they’re good. Very good: Immense rolling drumming holds the sound down. There are some hoarse-throated vocals, but their material is largely instrumental and defined by a textured guitar sound. Samples drift and drummer switches to synths, and later does vocals to. With monumental crescendos but also chugging riffs galore, there are hints of Maybeshewill but heavier, calling to mind Pelican and Neurosis. It’s a strong performance from a band with a dynamic sound and an accomplished set, and who stand out in a populous field.

Pijn

Pijn

Leeds trio Irk (a configuration of drums / bass / vocals) have chunked up and tightened up a fair bit since I last saw them. They still sound like Blacklisters (and that’s by no means a ba thing), but lay down some hefty grooves with assurance. They land a brace of new ones early on, the second of which, ‘Insect Worship’, is built around an elastic funk groove over which echoed vocals wash before it busts into a jagged, jolting, hollering finale. People start moving and getting into it properly around halfway through the set, and it’s gratifying to see them so well-received away from their local scene. I always maintain that the test of any band’s quality is their ability to convince an impartial audience Too many bands seem content to build themselves up to being big on their local scenes and play to their mates who’ll always turn up and tell them their great, but band with ambition have to take the risk of stepping outside the scene. Some nights, they’ll tank, however good they are. But with their frenetic hybrid of Shellac, Nirvana and The Jesus Lizard, filtered through the warped prism of Blacklisters, they manage to more than convince this respectable Manchester crowd, and deservedly so.

Irk

Irk

Widnes trio Mums offer a different permutation of the three-piece: they have two guitars but no bass and sound a fair bit like Melvins. Having seen Melvins only a couple of weeks back, it’s not entirely surprising that they’re not quite as magic as their mighty forebears but then, few acts can truly touch Buzzo and co. Still, Mums are young and infuse their megalithic riffery with a finely-tuned pop edge. The slowed-down sludge of ‘Can of Worms’ which crashed in about a third of the way into the set is stonking. Guitarist Roanne Wood is slight in build and looks girlie in paisley a minidress: her Marshall JCM 800 amp and 4×12” stack is bigger than her and the riffs grinding forth from it are similarly huge.

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Mums

With stereotypical German efficiency, Heads. pull back a 20-minute overrun on stage times to start only five minutes later than scheduled. With enhanced lighting and an immense, dense but crisp sound, their textured and very heavy riff-centric material is given optimal conveyance. It’s the bass that leads. Low down, twisting, grinding, it’s melded to thunderous percussion. Guitarist Ed Fraser sweats like rain after just three songs: this is a band that really gives everything to their performance I can’t be sure if Fraser’s guitar’s signal is split through two amps: if it is, it may explain the depth and richness of the sound. It may simply be that these guys are sonic wizards, the magical triangle of the pow trio amplifying the input of each player threefold to produce a sonic summit.

Heads

Heads.

On the one hand, it feels criminal that bands this good should be playing in venues upstairs from pubs with a capacity of maybe 100. On the other, this is where the real buzz lies: seeing bands of this calibre for six quid, up-close-and-personal, while supping a decent pint that cost £3.50, from a proper glass, while people up the road are watching Lionel Ritchie from a vantage that suggests they’d have fared better watching it on telly while having forked out a fortune for the ‘pleasure’ feels like a real win.