You know it’s hot when the bands are towelling their faces down during the soundcheck. The already perspiring guitar/drum duo Boycott the Baptist take to the stage in full nun’s attire and thrash out a red-hot racket. It’s all about pace: the drummer’s technique involves hitting every drum in the kit as hard as possible and at a rate of 50 beats a second. It’s not subtle, but it’s brutal and effective.
George (wearing some uncommonly short jeans shorts) and Alex seem like affable guys, but their sound’s far from friendly. Famine – another guitar / drums duo – show more refinement than BTB, the songs more overtly structured with some tight stop / start breaks and tempo changes, as well as texture, variety and technical competence, but it’s still hard-hitting and very much geared toward frenetic tempo and brutality.
Wizard’s Beard owe me a pint. Following a brace of bassless duos, the quintet bring the bass, boasting a brace of basses, and if I’m not mistaken, no fewer than 11 bass strings to power a thunderous low-end assault. So much so that during the first song, the vibrations cause my point to vibrate right off the shelf and all down the backs of my legs. Good job it’s only £2.55 a pint in here. Yes, you read that right. Needless to say, it evaporates in seconds. And far from being the purveyors of fantasy prog their name suggests, they hammer out a downtuned, downtempo doomy trudge. The singer looks like a regular clean-cut gym goer, and shakes hands with members of the audience, moments before flaying them alive, delivering the most painful squawking vocal imaginable. Like the bray of a tortured pterodactyl, it cuts through the earth-shuddering grind despite being low in the mix. The end of the world will probably sound just like this.
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And then Corrupt Moral Altar, despite some amp trouble (guitarist John is down to playing through just the one rig, instead of his customary two), lay it all to waste. Front man Chris may have some beef on him, but he’s got incredible energy, pounding and stomping his feet, gut and half his arse on display. Like he gives a shit. This isn’t about playing cool – how can it be when the audience are slowly liquefying? - but about catharsis. He paces across the room in front of the stage and down the room on the bench that runs down the long wall of the room, dripping sweat and saliva down on the punters and yours truly, who’s cleverly positioned near the left-hand speaker stack. He gets in people’s faces: I can actually smell the garlic on his breath as he screams streams of venomous vitriol into the mic.
Over the course of thirty-five minutes, Corrupt Moral Altar charge headlong through a set culled from their full-throttle debut long-player, ‘Mechanical Tides’ and ferocious isn’t the half of it. Combining the ire and pace of hardcore punk with the serrated edges of adrenalized metal, they forge a sound that distils the purest anger into sonic firebombs that detonate into explosive bursts of sludgy grindcore with a grimy, crusty edge. The intensity is every bit as blistering as the heat. This is keeping it real.
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