For years now, I’ve been eyeing up London’s Desertfest as an event I would greatly like to attend, but in the past, prior commitments, grown up responsibilities and general lack of time/energy/money have combined to stifle my vague dreams of attendance.

In spite of all the reports I’ve heard about how well-organised and lovely the festival is moreover, there’s also been the fact that, given how much I’ve learned to HATE the myriad discomforts of attending music events in anything other than a thoroughly relaxed/DIY context in recent years, the idea of spending a bank holiday weekend pinballing around the sticky-floored venues of tourist-decimated Camden Town, suffering through endless bag checks, queues, beer-soakings, exit crushes, poor-sound-mix birthed tinnitus and midnight takeaways basically sounds like hell - especially when measured against the more tangible pleasures of quietly sitting at home, enjoying the comforts of food, wine, a sofa and some good movies, all with an additional £100+ still in my bank account.

But… this year’s line up. Oh man. For once, the weekend was free. The funds were present and correct. No immediate obstacles loomed. With a couple of weeks to go, we hit ‘confirm’ on the ticket booking. Three days and nights of unadulterated METAL (or, well, unadulterated HEAVY SPACE/STONER ROCK at the very least) loomed. Let me tell you how it went.

All photos are by Satori, by the way, for which thanks.

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Check-in and wristband collection on Friday afternoon is smooth and incident-free, and Desertfest HQ outside Camden’s actually-pretty-nice rock/metal pub The Black Heart is a happy and chilled out place to be. Lovely range of (I)PAs for drinking in the sun, and I highly commend their in-house milk stout for after dark.

Musically-speaking, proceedings begin upstairs, where The Quietus have (applaudably) been allowed to book a set of comparative outliers to the Desertfest remit (including the not-even-remotely rock or metal affiliated electro-punk band Snapped Ankles, who must have caused a few raised eye-brows amongst the purists).


No such concerns hopefully with Casual Nun, who deliver a far more straight forward, rock-orientated set that I had been anticipating - perhaps with one eye on the likely audience, or perhaps just because that’s the way they’re presently rolling, who knows. Anyway, we’re a pretty far cry from the pretty-fucking-out-there psychotropic improvisations found on their ‘Psychometric Testing by..’ and ‘Super Fancy Skeleton’ LPs, as the band’s Black Heart set finds them operating as a more or less trad v/g/b/d four piece, give or take the disorientating swathe of effects through which the ostensible frontman (sorry, I don’t know member names here) feeds his vocals. Working through a set of fairly structured/pre-planned material, they conjure a dense, legitimately deafening space-rock roar built upon the kind of forward moving, Can-via-Hawkwind grooves that remain quite impossible to fuck with, regardless of context. Despite the band’s fairly, well, casual attire (all four band members is front buttoning shirts and sensible shoes fergodssake, with only the vocalist’s Charlie Manson hair/beard combo giving any visual hint of sub-cultural affiliation), one hopes they might have succeeded in luring a few stray Fu Manchu fans into the choppier waters of their recorded output.


Next up, hard to contain my fanboy excitement at standing right in front of Mike Vest for a rare set by Melting Hand, the noise-rock sort-of-super-group he plays in alongside Gordon Watson of Terminal Cheescake/Luminous bodies on bass and Gum Takes Tooth drummer Tom Fug. A slightly tweaked line-up from the one that recorded their debut LP ‘High Collider’ a couple of years back now finds room for Marion Andrau (formerly(?) of Underground Railroad) on guitar and a chap named Wayne Adams (who is an unknown quantity to me at least) at synth. [Thank you to this Quietus interview for helping me with the name badges.]

Riffing on material presumably taken from their forthcoming second LP, I hereby declare that this incarnation of Melting Hand is fucking blinding, and I hope they stick with it for future engagements. Pedal LEDs glow and blink across the floor of the darkened stage like a miniature, nocturnal city, but these are players who know how to use such arguably excessive gear to its maximum advantage, primarily by doing what so many of those indie guitarists who spend thousands down the shops conspicuously fail to do – eg, turning it all on and turning it up.

The result is an exhilarating hurricane of chaotic, free-flowing noise-rock excelsis, sounding as if band-era Skullflower had lightened up, got the bunting out and had a birthday party, and it was bloody amazing. Though still very much centre stage, the rhythm section are a little less dominant in the mix here than they were on ‘High Collider’, thus encouraging the move toward a more full-on noise set-up (for this afternoon’s performance, at least), and a particular shout-out too must go to Andrau, who ably rises to the not-inconsiderable challenge of going head to head with Vest’s characteristic maximalist whiteout, transcending mere second/extra guitar status and adding her own wild and inventive contributions to the group’s sound at every turn. In fact the moment mid-set when she and Vest got about as close to trading/overlapping solos as Melting Hand’s oeuvre allows was a particular highlight for yours truly. Not quite 6PM, and mind and ears are both already blown.

Based on previous visits, I’ve always considered “Koko” (formerly the Camden Palace for those with long memories) to be a contender for one of London’s shittiest music venues. Though blessed with an exquisitely well-maintained (hopefully Grade One listed?) ex-music hall interior, the combination of irksome, unnecessary-queue-generating security procedures, poorly stocked rip off bar and TERRIBLE sound mix / acoustics have all helped make it a place to avoid since it re-opened a decade or so ago, and as such, I was happily surprised to find myself able to glide straight through the doors and into a good balcony position following a quick sprint in the Mornington Crescent direction, moments after The Obsessed began their set.


Sound is as echoy and murky as ever, making it difficult to catch the pearls of snarled, overgrown teenager wisdom Scott “Wino” Weinrich drops between songs, but when the drummer counts in, he and his recently recruited new rhythm section cut through the mix like pros. (Admittedly, the bass sounds a bit like someone distantly operating a machine lathe somewhere down the street, but, as I’ll learn over the course of the weekend, that’s something you’ve apparently got to get used to in these, uh, let’s say established, London venues.)

You’ve gotta love a guy who sticks to his story, and Wino is certainly that. Through Spirit Caravan, The Hidden Hand, his self-titled records and his contributions to Saint Vitus and Place of Skulls, Wino has kept his particular vision alive across four decades, and as a long time fan, I’m stoked to finally see this living, breathing personification of the heavy rock ideal in the flesh, fronting a new incarnation of his earliest, and many would consider most essential, band.

Recognisable songs aside though, we could easily be watching any of the groups Wino has led over the years, and, regardless of the name on the ticket, everything I could have wanted from a Wino gig is present and correct. Pitched somewhere between the raven-beaked solemnity of ‘80s trad doom and a vein of sneering, anti-social biker rock sleaze that reaches even further back, his songs have riffs carved to last out the centuries, a cycle-engine grind backing up his weirdly melodic, funereal hymns to drug-baked cosmic journeying and perpetual outsiderdom, whilst an unmistakable whiff of psychedelic spirituality enters the picture each time he goes for a solo, sending twelve bar wonders of screeching, atemporal jazz-damaged beauty reverberating through the lofty reaches of the former Camden Palace.

Though he operates within a genre that even it’s biggest fans would have to admit is rife with aesthetic posturing, ridiculous excess and general tongue-in-cheek silliness, Wino has been living this music – through periods of addition, poverty and god knows what else – for as long as many of us have been alive, and his songs, even stretching as far back as The Obsessed’s first recordings from the mid ‘80s, retain a quality that is dead-eyed, rock solid and serious as death. It certainly feels like a rare privilege to see him doing his thing on a Friday afternoon in Camden, and I hope I’ll be able to do so again very soon.


‘Serious’ is also a term that springs to mind when discussing Ghold, who we just about squeeze in to see in the packed out Black Heart shortly afterwards. An intense, progressively minded London-based unit who have grown from a duo to a trio, and now seem to have a fourth participant on board, apparently playing a Fender Rhodes no less. Ghold prove to be the loudest band of the festival thus far, and the first to have me reaching for my ear plugs. Though their music is impressive by yardstick, I’m flagging me this point (wimp that I am), and the constant, tension-building noose-tightening of their long, multi-part compositions soon proves pretty gruelling. Having already been warned that folks were queuing down the road to get into a packed-to-capacity Electric Ballroom to catch a glimpse of sludge-core bruisers Eyehategod, I’m secretly relieved when the decision is taken to bale early in order to sit down with some food before pitching out a good spot for Napalm Death in a few hours time.

Now, say what you like about the Electric Ballroom, at least it’s unpretentious. Complete with wall coverings and floor/ceiling surfaces that look like they’ve been pulled together from scrap material to fix up a previous disaster, it’s… long overdue an overhaul, you might say, but it also has the most satisfactory sound mix of any of the large venues used by Desertfest, and a relatively well-stocked/non-extortionate bar and publicly accessible balcony and lounge area seal the deal. Electric Ballroom, yr alright.

Now -- Napalm Death. I’ll admit this has the potential to be a weird one for me. Over the past few years, I’ve come to revere the band’s seminal late ‘80s recordings almost to the point of mania. If prompted in fact, I’ll be delighted to tell you in great detail exactly why ‘From Enslavement To Obliteration’ just edges out ‘Reign in Blood’ as the most important, innovative and/or mind-blowing extreme metal recording ever issued. [If you’re not familiar with it, please become so.] But – as much as I love their music from this era, that is basically where my knowledge of the band ends. I honestly know about as much about what they’ve done since 1990’s ‘Harmony Corruption’ as the average punter at a Yo La Tengo gig, so…. given that that’s about when the line up who are performing as Napalm Death this evening first began to cohere, this could be something of an issue, perhaps?


Well, I needn’t have worried. Far from legitimising such doltish fanboy dilemmas, it turns out Barney Greenway is such an ingratiating frontman, you could probably tell him you’ve just arrived from Venus and aren't really sure what this whole ‘organised sound’ thing is all about yet, and he’d slap you on the back and add you to the ranks of the chosen without further comment.

I’m sure that, for those who have been more closely involved with the metal scene than I have been over the years, Barney’s distinctive on-stage persona must be beyond a joke by this point, but, as a Napalm Death first timer, I’ve got to admit I found him a disarming and hugely charming presence.

How can I best put this… one of the things I’ve always loved about Napalm Death is the way they square the circle vis-à-vis making violent, hate-filled music dealing with subject matter of unimaginable horror, and presenting it as a positive, cathartic, morally integrated force for good in the world. In the three decades that have passed since the band’s initial burst of inspiration, it has become the norm for groups operating in all sub-categories of hardcore and extreme metal to shroud their work in imagery of misery, horror, mass death, torture, genocide, nuclear Armageddon, skulls, gas masks etc etc, to the extent that the original thinking behind this off-the-peg aesthetic is often lost behind a flippant attitude of “fuck everything” misanthropic prurience that, weirdly, seems almost unique to white males who have grown up in parts of the world not conspicuously ravaged by war and death.

I’m not trying to guilt-trip anyone for enjoying this aesthetic – god knows, as a fan of horror movies and doom metal, I’ve spent a fair amount of time wallowing in it myself over the years – but, as stated above, I appreciate the way that, ever since their inception, Napalm Death have been at pains to justify their work (and indeed, their name and artwork) in grown up, socio-political terms, and to make their intentions clear. Then as now, their music is framed as an expression of (and entirely legitimate response to) the horror they feel at the pain and injustice that is inflicted upon the people of the world every single day by those in positions of power, and, by forcing their listeners to confront it in the most visceral way possible, they hope to raise awareness, prompt action, and all that other good social activist type stuff.

They are not putting gore and dead bodies on their album covers just because they think it’s cool, in other words, and I’ve always liked the thought that, in the unlikely event that a benevolent global socialist republic suddenly came in to being, prompting universal equality and world peace, Napalm Death would gladly down tools and spend the rest of their lives playing nice, mellow music for dancing in the sun (perhaps changing their name to, I dunno, ‘Happy Children’ or something).

Anyway, getting back to Barney, I love the way he puts all this across so clearly over the course of a sixty minute Napalm Death set that no one could possibly be left in doubt re: where the band are coming from. In an area of live performance so often characterised (understandably) by muscle-flexing aggression or mute hostility, it is absolutely delightful to find this guy saying “okie dokey, right then, what’s next..” in the voice of a holiday camp comedian in between outbursts of guttural, throat-shredding carnage, hailing the audience as “friends!” with the enthusiasm and good cheer of the MC at an anti-war rally, even as he awkwardly jogs on the spot and hops about the stage like a middle-aged marathon runner warming up on the starting line. He’s just lovely, basically. What a great guy.

Again, I’m sure many in the crowd will have rolled their eyes as his political sloganeering, having heard it all before, but from my POV, he succinctly addressed the broad points that needed to be made to put the brutality of the music in its proper context - religious bigots, slum landlords, anti-abortion campaigners and assorted others can all fuck off; nuclear brinkmanship on the part of world leaders is insane; a happy and comfortable life free from discrimination on the basis of race, gender or sexuality is the right of every human being. Not exactly controversial stuff, I’ll grant you, but hard to restate it too often, right? By the time he’s exhorting us – “in a spirit of friendship and solidarity” – to help him complete the title of a certain Dead Kennedys song – I’m happy to yell along.

(Deep breath.) And of course it helps that the band are fucking great too. I mean, I may have been out to lunch for thirty years, but this is f-ing Napalm Death, innit? They’re hardly going to half-ass it. Shane Embury’s fingers on the bass still look as if they’re moving in X4 fast-forward, and Mitch Harris’s guitar tone sounds like a wolverine biting the head off a terrier. Danny Herrera’s drumming may not quite recreate the beyond human insanity of Mick Harris’s work in the ‘80s, but he still does the business well enough to send just about any hardcore band I’ve watched in the past five years fleeing in terror.

What a fantastic band. What a fantastic set. I need to catch up on those post-1990 records and pick myself up a (hopefully fair trade) T-shirt post-fucking-haste.

To be continued…

Labels: Casual Nun, Desertfest, Ghold, live reviews, Melting Hand, Napalm Death, The Obsessed, Wino

Napalm Death –
Rare Tracks 86-88 7”
(white label)

Just like the cover says: a bootleg of unreleased studio takes, split EP tracks and live cuts recorded by the “Scum side one” and “From Enslavement..” line-ups of Napalm Death. 15 tracks on a 45rpm 7”.

If you know the score, you won’t gain much from reading further. What more needs to be said? I guess I’m aiming this one at the uninitiated. I don’t mean that in a snobbish sorta fashion, but let’s face it, I don’t write about extreme metal much round here, and chances are there is a significant portion of what I laughably call my readership for whom the idea of listening to Napalm Death would seem an outlandish, nay abhorrent, suggestion. This one goes out to them.

Ahem.

As my tastes have drifted back toward heavier punk/metal recently, I’ve been playing early Napalm Death a lot, and it never ceases to leave me cowering, electrified and awed, if you’re able to triangulate some combination of those varied reactions. Napalm Death is not of my era, not of my culture, and alien to my social circumstances. Nobody (except possibly John Peel) has ever told me I should listen to Napalm Death, and yet I do.

Well I remember, many years ago, when a friend of mine bought “From Enslavement To Obliteration” as part of some ‘three LPs for £5’ deal. We took it home and put it on. We thought it might be funny, if you can believe that. Needless to say, “From Enslavement To Obliteration” is about as funny as cancer, and at least half as harrowing. Birthed in a whole other universe from the camp bombast of ‘Maiden or Venom’s gonzo Satanism, or indeed from the Anal Cunt/Agoraphobic Nosebleed school of goofball grindcore that infested our schoolboy brains through the ‘90s, the suffocating, cathartic violence of the early ND records has existed to wipe the grin from the faces of “lol, metal” chancers like me, every day since they were recorded.

Even more unsettling was a quick glance at the lyrics sheet, revealing a complete absence of the kind of gore and corpse-fucking I had assumed bands like Napalm Death were supposed to bellow about, their unintelligible outpourings instead forming an expressionistic response to the agonising frustrations of global injustice, with a directness and fury that put most of our socially conscious ‘punk’ heroes to shame.

It was all a bit too much to deal with back then. I didn’t really have much of a feeling for truly malevolent music, how ever much I might have fronted. 2010, and the time seems right, don’t ask me why.

I know this isn’t exactly an original observation, but the more I listen, the clearer it becomes that Napalm Death were less a metal band, more an incredibly intense punk band. I mean, they draw on some metal background for sure, but only the bits that really matter – the lingering post-industrial nihilism of Black Sabbath, the screaming adrenalin overload of Slayer. And who, seeking to fuck people up with extreme rock music in the mid-80s, would not draw upon these things? This is the music of men smart and angry enough to know you’re not going to get very bloody far taking your cues from, I dunno, the Exploited or some shit, and that it doesn’t matter what your hair looks like or what kind of trousers you wear either. In spirit and overall emotional heft, they are closer to Black Flag than anything else – music that foregrounds full spectrum HEAVINESS (in the hippie sense of a ‘heavy cat’) over any genre bullshit. Only difference is, ND had a bigger war in mind, with a lot more casualties. They had a copy of “Reign In Blood” too. More of a lightning rocket attack than ‘Flag’s noble trudge through the trenches. Just keep that in mind, ready your neck muscles and drop the needle.

The very nature of this music and its culture – the extremely short songs, constantly fragmenting line-ups, labyrinthine discography – makes it an effort for anyone without nerd-level scene commitment to get a handle on precisely what the hell’s going on over the course of this 7”. As such, I’ll avoid tripping myself up by trying to identify the specific musicians on different bits, and instead just say that there’s nothing on this disc that suggests the music is anything but the work of a single, unified force, drilled to the point of desperate perfection. The dedication it must take for a band to essentially swap their whole line-up halfway through an LP (as ND did on “Scum”) and yet maintain such a unique and demanding sound is mind-boggling. Where did they find TWO guys who could play bass like that? Two guys who could si - uh, make noises with their throat – like that?

I’ve listened to plenty of doom, but I’ve never heard bass that swings so deep, so cthonic as the sound the guy is getting on the studio cuts on this record – ultimate bass cliché I know, but it’s like being hit in the gut by a chunk of flying masonry. Standing in the room where that sound was happening must have really fucking hurt, a point that’s not lost on the vocalist (Lee Dorrian I assume? Did they have another guy before him?) – twenty five years of absurd metal ‘vo-kills’ later, and still no one sounds like that – it’s like someone’s tearing his fucking soul out. I don’t need to tell you about the drumming – you can guess. Guitar sucks the whole sound into itself like a vortex – indescribable fucking distorto-wall/harmelodic whammy nightmare shit, like you might compare to Ron Asheton or Kerry King were the tone not so cruelly, chaotically vile.

Some song titles: “Your Achievement”, “Deceiver”, “Multinational Corporations, pt. 2”, “Retreat To Nowhere”, “Understanding”.

In short, this disc is a sightseeing tour of a couple of years in which one (or, weirdly, perhaps several) of the most deadly serious, unstoppable, flat-out terrifying rock bands ever to exist were performing under the name “Napalm Death”.

Unless you’re a fan of generic, midfield Death Metal (which is fine), the Napalm Death brand has been creatively redundant since probably about the dawn of the ‘90s. Such is the way with ‘heritage’ punk/metal bands. Somewhere in the record racks though, these guys are still there, ready to play songs for you:


No hurry or anything, but one day you might feel like letting them in.

Labels: METAL, Napalm Death, singles reviews