Posts Tagged ‘Sludge’

Paradise Lost – Medusa

Posted: 28 July 2017 in Albums
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Nuclear Blast – 1st September 2017

Christopher Nosnibor

When charged with the task of covering a new release by a ‘big’ name act, or an act which has been around a long time and developed a significant global following, but that you’re not an ardent fan of, the pressure is on. As a reviewer, you’re supposed to know everything about every aspect of every band ever, and the kind of act who has an established fanbase is also the kind of act who has a fanbase who expect critics to really know their shit before passing comment on ‘their band. At least, that’s my perception based on hard experience from sitting on both sides of the fence.

That progenitors of gothic metal Paradise Lost are still here to launch the fifteenth album of their career is impressive by any standards. And while I’ve been aware of them for an eternity – as a Sisters of Mercy fan for an even longer eternity, it was their cover of ‘Walk Away which provided an introduction – I’ve never really spent any time getting acquainted with their back catalogue. Nevertheless, and despite their death / doom roots, the fact Medusa is strong and proper heavy is even more impressive, especially given their forays into Depeche Mode-style synthpop and electronica and a stint on EMI which saw them move further into more commercial territories.

As the press release notes, ‘most people will know Medusa as the Gorgon from Greek mythology; she is the infamous beast with venomous snakes for hair who will turn anyone that dares to look into her eyes to stone. It is this hideous creature who Paradise Lost have chosen to be the figureheard for their 15th studio album, as, from a philosophical perspective, she is more than simply a monster.’

It’s the epic, doomy trudge of ‘Fearless Sky’ which grinds out for over eight and a half minutes which gets the album off to a dark and suitably intense start and demonstrates they’ve still got the high-art bombast which defines their sound, and of the poem which gave them their name in the first place. It was hearing segments of Milton’s immensely epic poem read aloud by one of my university’s more eccentric but enthusiastic professors which turned me on to his work, and in context, it all fits together. Medusa is an immense and ambitious album, and it’s also as heavy as hell.

The thunderous tribal drumming which propels the low-end focused sludge riffery of ‘Gods of Ancient’ leads the album deeper into darkness before the snarling desolation of ‘From the Gallows.’ ‘The Longest Winter’ is perhaps more accessible with its processed, dry and altogether more melodic vocals, but the guitars are still are thick and overdriven as you like. As for the title track, it brings the sense of immense portent with its groaningly heavy guitars and noodling lead, paired with a sense of gothic theatricality which lends it a kind of poeticism.

This is an album that trudges, dark and heavy, for the duration, and any comparisons to other bands from either the goth or metal sides of the equation are essentially redundant because it was this band who effectively spawned the hybrid which Medusa so perfectly epitomises anyway.

What makes Medusa a great album is that while it is heavy, it’s heavily gothy and it’s ultra metally in the snarling, guttural sense, and it’s also got immense range. As such, it doesn’t ever feel formulaic or dull, and ultimately, Medusa is a strong album which stands up in the Paradise Lost catalogue.

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Melvins – A Walk With Love and Death

Posted: 2 July 2017 in Albums
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Ipecac Recordings – 7th July 2017

Christopher Nosnibor

Melvins’ 415th album since their formation in the Mezozoic era is a double: their first. As if the founding sludgelords, the masters of the megalithic, needed to take it to another level of epic indulgence. A Walk With Love and Death isn’t exactly a concept album, as much as an album of two halves. So says the press release. If anything, it’s actually two distinct albums released together: Death, a proper Melvins’ release and Love, the score to the Jesse Nieminen directed, self-produced short also titled A Walk With Love and Death.

But of course, it’s a Melvins album. Which means that, fundamentally, it sounds like a Melvins album. That’s no criticism: I want a Melvins album to sound like a Melvins album but then, would it ever sound like anything else?

They really make full use of the double-album format for this outing. It begins with a slow-building, expansive six and a half-minuter that has echoes of ‘Mine is No Disgrace’ from The Crybaby, but instead of erupting into a blistering wall of noise, keeps the focus tight on a proggy trip with a vaguely psychedelic hue.

‘Sober-delic’ follows, a mid-tempo trudge which also stretches beyond the six-minute mark and ‘Euthanasia’ is vintage Melvins, a hefty sludge trudge with heavily treated vocals. ‘What’s Wrong With You?’ is a warped psychedelic stoner rock tune with a twisted pop edge, propelled by a thumping bassline and wild guitars. The nine songs which make up the Death album don’t exactly offer up any surprises (which is arguably a surprise in itself given the band’s wildly varied output over the last 30 years), but do deliver a Melvins album that’s as solid as anything they’ve done. It brings the grind. It hammers with the riffs. It’s sludgy, grungy, yet packs some great pop moments. And what at times it lacks in terms of attack, it compensates in scale, with the prog leanings of ‘Flaming Creature’ partially submerged by the low-end churn that they’ve made their own.

Commencing with a vaguely experimental intro track, in which mellifluous piano notes drift through the sound of chatter, the Love set is a very different proposition. The fourteen tracks are shorter and stranger, leaning toward noisy ambience, and find Melvins revisiting the kind of territory explored on Prick and the playfully perverse ‘Cowboy’ single from the mid ‘90s.

When they do actually play tunes, it’s whacked out, trippy psychedelic pop or fucked -up jazz: ‘Give it to Me’ is a zany, mess of doodling Hammond organs and theramins duelling with thumping percussion that’s pure 60s garage. But mostly it’s weird shit like ‘Chicken Butt’ and ‘Halfway to Bakersfield’, and it’s all very much ‘what the fuck’?

It’s Melvins’ eternal capacity to confound which is an integral aspect of their enduring appeal. It would be so easy, and no doubt more career-savvy to work to their tried and tested formula and to put out an album of straight ahead sludge rock every two to three years, instead of going off on infinite tangents and releasing two albums a year. But the fact is, they’re actually very good at producing weird, far-out experimental shit, and the results of some of their collaborations have been as strong as unexpected. It’s their drive to create, and to endlessly push in so many different directions which keeps Melvins fresh, and above all, relevant.

Melvins - Love and Death

Obelyskkh – The Providence

Posted: 5 April 2017 in Albums
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Exile On Mainstream – 21st April 2017

Christopher Nosnibor

It begins with a howl of feedback. Of course it does. The sustain continues through the opening power chords: doomy, slow, before it all comes crashing in, trudging tempo and gut-churningly downtuned.

Obelyskkh’s fourth album isn’t so much about surprises, but about continuing – and extending – the trajectory of its predecessors, albeit with a greater emphasis on groove. Not that this is an album you can dance to: it’s very much one to slow headbang to. The press release draws attention to the fact that the album’s title ‘evokes one of H. P. Lovecraft’s iconic poems, providing inspiration for the album’s lyrical content and the artwork for The Providence. Another dimension to the album is illustrated almost perfectly by French revolutionist Victor Hugo: “Above all, you can believe in Providence in either of two ways, either as thirst believes in the orange, or as the ass believes in the whip.” The band lived by this message throughout their uphill battle to complete the record.’

It’s taken them four years, and The Providence feels like four years’ anguish and slog distilled into six immense pieces. The title track, which opens the set, is twelve minutes long. It’s not pretentious, but heavy with portent: this is a vast doomscape of an album, dominated by some colossal guitar riffery, propelled by a juggernaut of a rhythm section.

Things get a bit progressive folk-metal in the middle of ‘Raving Ones,’ but when the riff hits its stride, it’s a throbbing, driving rush. Elsewhere, ‘Northern Lights’ veers toward classic, vintage horror, with a deluge of cataclysmic guitars burning a purgatorial furrow on the scale of the Grand Canyon. And just when the thick distortion threatens to burn out the eardrums, a shift toward upper frequency overload provides the punishing attack needed to complete the abominable mission. The fourteen-minute ‘NYX’ stands as the album’s centrepiece, and is a classic slab of thunderous, sludgy doom metal. Over the course of a succession of passages, it grinds its way to a punishing critical mass, with velocity consumed by density.

Clocking in at under six minutes, ‘Aeons of Iconoclasm’ feels almost throwaway in its brevity. Fear chords weave and waft almost subliminally, and it feels at first like a mere interlude, but then the gates of hell open and every screaming demon ever known tears down from the blackest of skies.

In contrast, the slow, but so, so, dense guitar overload of ‘Marzanna’ feels like a gentle wind-down, although at over nine and a half minutes of roaring thunder and groaning, droning, slowed riffage and mangled vocals that squeeze Sabbath through a Melvins filter it’s hardly some kind of loungecore fluff.

Everything about The Providence is immense. This is heavyweight, it’s doomy metal exactly the way it should be.

 

 

Obelyskkh – The Providence

Telepathy – Tempest

Posted: 2 April 2017 in Albums
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31st March 2017 – Golden Antenna Records

Christopher Nosnibor

That we live in a post-world probably requires little to no qualification. Post-rock and post-metal and post-hardcore seem almost passé in the era of post-truth. But while these genres have now been in existence for some time now, they’ve continued to evolve and to remain relevant – at least for those exponents who’ve moved with the times, and who’ve adapted and contributed to the progression and expansion of the sound of their respective genres. Ok, so post-hardcore seems to have remained firmly rooted in the early years of the new millennium, and Kerrang! Radio in 2017 sounds very like Kerrang! Radio in 2007 or even 2002, and I’ve noticed little discernible change in the EPs which continue to arrive for my reviewing attention.

Meanwhile, post-rock, post-metal, and neo-prog releases seem to have reduced in volume of late, and those which do arrive seem to indicate a subtle shift, and expansion on the parameters of the respective genres. This is one of those releases where the shift isn’t so much subtle as seismic.

Telepathy’s latest offering is appropriately titled: Tempest effortlessly transitions between moments of tranquil melody and raging, thunderous sonic storms, positioning it between the realms of post-rock and post-metal, while incorporating a host of elements from other genres to forge a sound that is, above all, textured, detailed, and dynamic. Drawing on neo-prog and sliding in doomy, sludgy riffage between the expansive atmospheric passages, the album’s eight tracks – the majority of which extend well beyond the six-minute mark – feel as if they’ve allowed themselves the space to fully explore the range and potential of each composition. The ideas are developed, the individual movements co-ordinated for maximum impact.

Penultimate track ‘Water Divides the Tide’ is one of those pieces which effectively defines ‘epic’: a gentle, chiming guitar is crushed by powerchords. Rapidfire drumming dominated thunderous kick-drum pedal work leads a thrash-inspired section before things space out again, but the soaring lead guitars are underpinned by a growling low-end, and rhythm guitars with a blistering afterburn. Lightweight, it’s not, and the closer the eight-minute ‘Metanoia’ is nothing short of crushing in its weight, a megalithic, lumbering behemoth of doomy guitar battery.

But what sets Tempest apart from almost two decades of post-rock and post-metal is its sheer quality. This is an exciting album which, if anything, reminds us why post-rock and post-metal were exciting in the first place.

 

Telepathy – Tempest

Heavy Baby Sea Slugs – Teenage Graveyard Party

Posted: 8 January 2017 in Singles and EPs
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Heavy Baby Records – 21st January 2017

Christopher Nosnibor

Ok, so I’m not one to judge a record by its cover, but obviously there’s a lot to be said for packaging music in – or with – cover art which reflects the contents in some way. Heavy Baby Sea Slugs’ new offering, the Teenage Graveyard Party EP has artwork which says ‘sixteen minutes of raw, full-tilt sludge-metal racket’, and funnily enough, that’s precisely what it delivers (as one might reasonably expect from a band who previously released an album entitled Fistula Missile and who seemingly enjoy considerably more success in Japan and Taiwan than at home in Texas).

‘King Midas of Shit’ launches the EP with a savage deluge of nasty, gnarly noise, piledriving in at a hundred miles an hour. Talk about a sonic slap round the chops! It’s a frantic, frenetic and stubbornly unpolished aural assault which spits and snarls and spews in all directions.

The title track slows the pace and actually offer some semblance of a tune, with some proper singing and everything – at least until about halfway through when the band put their collective pedal to the metal and thrash their way senseless to the end. Don’t expect any cuddles from the bass-led thunder of ‘Pit Bait’, either. It comes on like a Motorhead 45 being played at 33.

The six-minute closer, ‘Zero-One’ really brings the grind with a downtuned, gut-churning trudge that’s somewhere between early Swans and early Melvins. It’s a gruelling dirge which makes no real attempt to get going, and instead spends is time making threats, with slow, heavy drums, scrawling feedback and yawning bass drone. It’s crushingly heavy, and feels like the soundtrack to an eternity in purgatory.

It may only be sixteen minutes in duration, but Teenage Graveyard Party is a gloriously unpleasant, dirty, mangled mess of noise. Party on, dudes.

 

Heavy Baby Sea Slugs – Teenage Graveyard Party

Watch ‘Without’ by Ex People

Posted: 7 January 2017 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Fancy some low-slung, tweaked-up, bass-heavy stoner rock for the weekend?

We recommend ‘Without’ by Ex People ‘cause it’s ruddy fucking mint. and can’t wait for the album due later in the year.

Raging Speedhorn / Stoneghost / By Any Means – The Key Club, Leeds, 19th July 2016

Posted: 23 July 2016 in Live
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Christopher Nosnibor

It’s the hottest, or second-hottest, night of the year so far, with temperatures teetering at the top of the twenties. I managed to knock off work early to get the train over from York to Leeds in order to conduct an interview before the show, and having managed to chill with a pint in the North Bar for half an hour before the gig, I’m now back underground in the small, dark, box venue that is The Key Club, trying hard to make my £4.20 330ml bottle of Punk IPA last more than five minutes while I sweat my tits off and wait for the first of tonight’s three bands, By Any Means.

Sporting beards, vests, tattoos, and knee-length shorts, the Belfast band crash in hard. Their front man may strongly resemble Brian Blessed, but I suspect he’d be more likely to crush Flash’s oesophagus with his bare hands than proudly declare him to be alive. They crank out a set of intense, dense, throbbing metal and these no shortage of chug ‘n’ grind(core) in their meaty riff-driven tracks.

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By Any Means

Next up, Stoneghost, sporting beards, vests, tattoos, and knee-length shorts take to the stage with a holler of “Leeeeeds! How the fuck is everyone?” Everyone is fucking melting, as it happens, and the relatively restrained response is by no means an indication of a lack of appreciation. In comparison to By Any Means, Stoneghost are sonically denser, the guitar lines more technical, the drums more frenetic, the sound more brutal, and the front man more bullish. He’s got a mean look, and I certainly wouldn’t mess with him. But for all the thunder and aggression, they’ve got some monster choruses, and they earn themselves a one-man slam-dancing moshpit for their efforts.

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Stoneghost

Raging Speedhorn may be purveyors of gnarly sludge metal, but they’re certainly not uncivilised: drummer Gordon Morrison pours beer from bottles into (perspex) glasses before they play. After an inter-band playlist that featured, amongst others, Fudge Tunnel, they walk on to ‘The Heat is On’ by Glen Frey, and yes, the compact basement venue is fucking boiling. With the stage drenched in feedback, vocalists John Loughlin and Frank Regan stand, silent, at the front of the stage, simply leaning out toward the crowd, looking menacing, they hold it for a full minute. This is showmanship, and it’s the band’s commitment to the performance element of the show is integral to the live experience. That said, they’re not posers, by any means: in fact, they’re just a bunch of middle-aged guys with beards and tattoos, wearing vests / T-shirts and long shorts, but they give one hundred percent to the music, and the aggression, the brute force with which the songs are played is so genuine it’s scary. Their contrasting styles work well: Loughlin screams maniacally and looks deranged as he charges he stage, while Regan is almost nonchalant and looks like he’s relishing goading the crowd with ‘come on’ hand gestures before he spits and snarls into the mic.

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Raging Speedhorn

They pile in with ‘The Hate Song’ from second album We Will Be Dead Tomorrow, although much of the set focuses on the new album Lost Ritual, which is fair play, and no bad thing given that it’s a riff-led stonker. ‘Bring Out Your Dead’ and ‘Motorhead’ are slammed down early. Delving back to their debut for ‘Redweed’ elicits a strong reaction, and before long there’s a tornado of bodies frothing in front of the stage.

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Raging Speedhorn

One guy who’s filming the set on his mobile has his phone confiscated and starts whinging like a kid about how he wants to show his friends the show. No doubt he’ll be gutted that his footage won’t include the ball-busting climax: they close the set with a pulverising rendition of ‘Thumper’, and still have it in them to return for an encore of ‘Ten of Swords’.

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Raging Spedhorn

The full set – twelve tracks – may have lasted just under an hour, but no-one’s feeling short-changed. In the blistering heat, they’ve delivered a relentless set that shows Raging Speedhorn are as vital now as ever.

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.

Hearth Life I – Chunk, Leeds, 14th May 2016

Posted: 15 May 2016 in Live
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Christopher Nosnibor

Given the vast array of microgenres and the broad spread of metal itself, curating a metal festival must be quite a challenge. A number of friends of mine have, in recent years, complained of events leaning too much towards a certain part of the metal spectrum, with an overemphasis on doom or sludge. A lot of credit is therefore due to the organisers of the first Hearth Life event, hosted in one of Leeds’ hottest new underground venues, Chunk. To describe it as intimate would be an understatement. A rehearsal room for arts and music which doubles as a two-room venue, it’s smaller than some living rooms. And yet they’ve managed to host 14 bands representing a huge cross-section of noise from the more extreme end of the scale. And there isn’t a dud act on the bill.

Using the two ‘stages’ to optimum effect, and keeping sets to half an hour or less means the bands are on back-to-back with no more than a few minutes in between, for eight hours straight. But by alternating the faster and slower bands, it’s neither a non-stop frenzy nor a marathon slog through hours of droning doom. That they’d not only got in a decent range of beers, but taken the time to mark up on the price list the vegetarian / vegan friendly beverages, not to mention having food courtesy of local ‘real junk food’ nosh merchants Armley Junk-tion on a pay-what-you-feel basis, all showed an attention to detail and general thoughtfulness you simply don’t find in larger commercial ventures. And most miraculously, the bands ran to time on what was an insanely tight schedule.

I’d seen around a third of the bands on the bill previously, so my expectations were set, at least to an extent. That said, the lineup’s diversity is the key, and discovering Human Certainty more than justified getting down early. Combining heavily chorused / flanged goth guitars with grindcore vocals buried in a fuck-ton of reverb and delay, while the singer battles invisible demons as he charges maniacally to and fro, they’re a unique proposition and a compelling live act.

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Human Certainty

A whole lot less heavy were Beige Palace, and despite not being very metal, it as pleasing to see the young band, making their debut live appearance, receive a warm reception. Not for the last time during the event, I was reminded what an accommodating and thoroughly decent bunch of people attend the events with the most extreme bands. With shades of Young Marble Giants, Beige Palace make sparse-sounding music that’s jarring, dissonant and hints at a clash between early Pram and No Wave angularity.

While the space given to manic full-throttle thrashing was extremely welcome given the current vogue for doom, stoner and sludge, the grindcore acts on the bill felt a bit throwaway in their delivery here: Ona Snap announced themselves as being ‘fucking idiots’ before launching into 20 minutes of frenetic mayhem made up of short violent jolts of noise. They were tight, and went down well, but felt a bit too much like a party band to really pack a punch. Similarly, Famine – who I think are ace, and have seen evolve considerably over the last couple of years or so – seemed more about getting the crowd whipped into a frenzy, and consequent, their set felt more like an excuse to go mental than a serious assault on society. That said, having bemoaned the too-cool-for-school audiences at bigger gigs, they played hard and insanely fast, and it’s good to see this crowd going bonkers with some wild moshing and even crowd surfing in an extremely confined space. A tidal wave of bodies almost threatens to upend the makeshift bar during Horsebastard’s set. There is carnage. It’s good-natured, but carnage nonetheless.

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Famine

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Horsebastard

Ghold, touting new long player PYR are a band on the rise. Having expanded to a three-piece since I last saw them 11 months ago, they’re sounding denser and more layered than before. The drumming is explosive, and there’s a perverse sense of performance, as Oliver Martin plays and sings with his back to the audience, and Aleks Wilson, while forward-facing, hides behind his hair and is hardly conversational. But cultivating this distance between audience and band work well, and adds to the intrigue of a band who trade in pulverizing heavy sludge riffs while also incorporating elements of psychedelia and offering radical changes of tone and pace. Epic sludge workouts are contrasted with fast-paced attacks, although thy always keep the ‘heavy’ cranked up to the max. One-dimensional they aren’t, and in the space of their half-hour set they demonstrate more diversity than some band manage over a whole career. They’ve got some chops, alright, and I’m not talking about Wilson’s monster ‘burns.

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Ghold

The heavy trucker metal of Nottingham monster mofos Moloch bring the noise and a different kind of density. Dark, sludgy and burning with anguish, they embody pained nihilism, they’re unphased when the mic completely cuts out – that or front man Chris is simply too immersed in the thunderous wall of brutal rage he and his cohorts are churning out to make a deal of it. Either way, the sound guy is quick with a replacement and they power on through triumphant.

Palehorse, playing their last Leeds show and penultimate gig in a sixteen-year career, are given an extended, 45-minute slot, which is the day’s punishing highlight. Although not the last band to play (that slot is given to The Afternoon Gentlemen), they’re effectively the headliners. I took no notes during their set, too engrossed in the immense, brutal sound, and too crushed by the clamouring front rows to even consider anything beyond the immediate experience. The event page describes them as ‘noise shitting bass bastards’ (they’ve got two basses, but no guitars), while their bandcamp page heads them as being ‘London Powerviolence’. Call their music what you like, it’s as heavy as fuck. The vast bottom-end is enough to rearrange internal organs, and contrasts with Nikolai Grune’s sharp, seething vocals. But it’s music that’s textured, articulate and powerful beyond mere brute force.

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Palehorse

It’s hard to stumble out of an event like this feeling anything other than elated. Live music is all about escape, release, and the more brutal and cathartic the music, the greater the release, and seeing so many incredible, intense bands in such close proximity is exactly the way it should be. It’s personal, intimate to the point of exclusive, interior. There may have been a few crazies in the crowd, but there were no out-and-out cunts: the vibe was one of camaraderie and companionship, the event a coming together of outsiders and misfits in a celebration of all things outsider and beyond the grasp and cognisance of the mass media and general populace. Let’s hope this is the first of a long run for Hearth Life.

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Shrykull

Ghold – PYR

Posted: 18 April 2016 in Albums
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Ritual Productions – 6th May 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

PYR is the third album by sludgelords Ghold, and the press release promises an album ‘towering with a sonic thickness, frantic dizzying energy and shattering immediacy, penetrated by despondent howls and an uncompromising slice of remorselessness’. Christ. So it’s heavy, then?

You could say that. It begins with a slow throb, a low, deep bass tone that borders on ambience and lurks on the peripheries of awareness. Off course, you know it’s going to come in heavy at some point, but the suspense… The release is glorious. A throbbing beast of a riff ploughs in, the bass dominant, the occasional vocals barely audible in the landslide of sludge. After the 11-minute monolithic beast that is the first track, ‘Collusion with Traitors’, ‘Blud’ piledrives in with a squalling frenzy that’s more Fudge Tunnel than Sunn O))) and clocks in at an uncharacteristically concise five minutes.

‘CCXX’ brings more weight and overloading riffs with crushing bass to the fore, but it’s the 21-minute ‘Despert Thrang’ which dominates the album in every way. It’s practically an album in its own right. Again, it’d all about the build, about the pacing. Gradually, a tempest rises from not a whisper but a downturned, growl. Blasts of percussion and powerchords blast in, haltingly, threatening to break but holding back until finally, the levee breaks and the riff powers forth. What else is there to do buy clench your fists, mouth ‘fuck yes’ and get down? It’s got some serious heft, and evolves over the course of its epic span, finally culminating in a blitzkrieg of noise.

While this is very much an album made for vinyl – of the kind that you want to play rather than stick on your wall as some kind of hip-kid statement, the CD does offer a bonus cut in the shape of ;’Something of Her Old Fire’, a gnarly bass-driven grind that trudges its way mercilessly to a final climax.

For all the big distortion and emphasis on the bottom end, not to mention the relentless churn that defines the album, there is texture, and in terms of tempo changes and dynamic, PYR has considerable range. And yes, it’s devastatingly heavy.

 

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