Tag Archives: Industrial Noise

Conan – Space Witch – Khost – Corinth: Live at Star and Garter, Manchester, UK

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Conan PQ

Conan. Photo by Paul Quinn

Opening up this latest night in the attic of Manchester’s ‘Old Lady’, the UK’s biggest Doom secret laid waste to a criminally small gathering. Download Festival sadly took the country’s photographers away from the crushing, hypnotic groove that is Leeds’ Corinth; Ben Corkhill and Tom Clayton roaring out, the former painting Post-Black leads through a titanic swamp of bludgeoning power and monolithic rhythms, his fellow protagonists looking out laconically as if they had no idea of the monstrous effect of their sound. One day, and it’s coming, these will be the new darlings of the Low-end. They are THAT good.

With a laptop centre-stage, and cavernous crashes of bass and distorted riffs either side, Birmingham’s Khost held court between those who didn’t understand it, and the majority who were mesmerised by the cacophonous, spectral sounds. The duo appeared like a hooded, homeless Godflesh, boys from the gutters of Piccadilly, but their crashing ambient power was impossible to ignore. The intermittent entry of bass notes over the cascading squall was positively bowel-clearing. A staggering, imploding feedback of Industrial noise, I could have walked away at this point knowing I’d seen the most important metal gig in Manchester for years.

Picking up my shattered nerves, I predicted that the occasionally more pedestrian Psych-Doom of Stoke’s Space Witch would be dull in comparison. Sequencer Peter Callaghan is often the sole focal point yet they turned out to be the most animated band of the evening; their booming, spaced-out grooves maintaining interest without the spark of the previous two bands. More powerful than I’ve seen them before however, the crowd were bewitched and, loving the pounding oscillations, seemingly forgot everything that had gone before.

Conan is the most crushing experience you’ll ever have live. Jon Davis delivered screams from a small stage that may as well have been the tip of Everest, his pulverising riffs threatening to destroy part of the city. Latest drummer Rich Lewis was mobile, frighteningly powerful, eviscerating his kit with unfettered ferocity whilst the building buckled under the titanic mass of ‘Total Conquest’. Captivating, oppressive, yet hypnotic, it’s impossible to convey the effect this band have in a live setting. The whole night was one obliterating, skin-itching, unfathomable blow to the soul after another; but with closer ‘Satsumo’, the headliners proved themselves an indescribable, barrelling monstrosity. In a Mancunian attic, a church for support musicians and fans alike, sometimes weight is everything.

 

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PAUL QUINN

 

 


Pig Heart Transplant – For Mass Consumption

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PHT

 

Why do we listen to music? The standard answer would be “because we enjoy it”, but the language used to praise “Extreme Music” often suggest the very opposite of enjoyment. We often describe the albums we love as “harrowing”, “inhuman”, “torturous” – to people who don’t know the language of Metal, it’s not clear why these are good things.

With For Mass Consumption (Iron Lung Records), PHT’s Jon Kortland has created music which reminds us why those adjectives are usually reserved for bad things. That much-abused label “Industrial” is the most relevant here, in the form presented by Leechwoman and early Godflesh – cold slabs of alienating, joyless noise generated by guitars and electronics, topped by abrasive shouted vocals and stark aesthetics. This is bleak, amelodic music focussed on repetition and suffocating rhythms.

If you’re thinking that it sounds pretty good, that’s because you’re missing a key factor. In one of the strangest musical decisions since letting Phil Collins sing, every track on For Mass Consumption is around forty seconds long. Plenty of Grind bands have made compelling albums with shorter tracks, but they do this by maintaining a furious pace and layering tracks together so that song-change is essentially key-change. With Pig Heart Transplant, practically every track starts with a slow build-up, gathers momentum until it seems about to go somewhere, then stops and lets the cycle begin again. It’s like an album of intros, to the extent that I actually checked that I hadn’t been sent an advanced release with only samples of each track – but no, this is how it’s meant to sound. It’s frustrating, because there are several moments on the album when they start to overcome the limitations of their sound and build up an effective atmosphere, but it’s over in seconds and the slow build starts again.

No doubt I’m missing the point. Kortland has clearly set out to create an album which alienates, confuses and prevents anything as crass and obvious as enjoyment, and he’s doubtlessly succeeded – I just can’t honestly recommend that anyone listens to it.

3/10

 

RICHIE H-R