If anyone thought the underground scene had been crushed by capitalism, the Internet and the mainstream, then stumbling into Temple of Boom – a backstreet venue that almost requires a secret knock to get into, assuming you can find it – is strong evidence to the contrary.
The first three acts of the night are playing in the uncomfortably-named ‘Meatlocker’ – so called because that’s precisely what it was before being converted. Well, I say ‘converted’ – the clear plastic curtains still hang just inside the entrance of the stark white space with a capacity of about 40. If watching the first couple of bands feels like a cross between a rehearsal session and a college party, it’s at least nice to know there’s a space for the next generation of bands to cut their teeth. It helps that the makeshift bar is selling cans of beer, lager and cider at £2 a go, and a decent array of crisps for 50p a bag. It feels like 20 years ago. It feels like the future. It feels like exciting times.
Lugubrious Children are the first band to rise above amateurism and slam home a solid and suitably heavyweight set.
Things really step up a good couple of notches as proceedings move to the main room with the arrival of Famine on stage. They’ve made huge leaps in the last year: supporting Corrupt Moral Altar last July, I saw a drum and guitar duo who were tight, high-powered and brutal. Their expansion to a three-piece, with Warren Lovett leading vocal duties has made them an even more formidable force with both more visual and sonic focus to the performance. Their one-minute sonic assaults are fast and furious, provoking some equally frenetic slam-dancing down the front.
Nottingham foursome Moloch bring the tempo right down with their sludgy dirges. The sheer weight of their sound threatens to shake the venue down to its foundations as they grind out their downtuned riffs at 30bpm. The front man looks like an angry trucker, but issues forth an agonized scream that sounds like he’s being dragged through purgatory in slow-motion.
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Full of Hell hit the stage at 100 miles an hour in a blizzard of blastbeats. It’s a frenzied wall of the most brutal, abrasive grindcore, interspersed with screeds of electronic white noise, replicating the experience of their 2014 collaboration with Merzbow. It’s nasty, it’s gnarly and intense, the vocals flipping from a skull-piercing shriek to a gut-wrenching guttural growl. Don’t ask me for song titles: after the frenzied minute-long ‘Gourdian Knot’, they must have packed a dozen tracks into their 24-minute set.
Pulverizing on every level, their sound is as extreme and as dense as early Carcass or Napalm Death, and delivered with a devastating efficiency, and the pace of the tracks means that moshing is replaced by spasmodic twitching in the front rows. There’s no fat to trim here.
The set ends, but they don’t leave the stage, instead taking a brief pause for breath before nailing the night with a 30-second encore track.
As music scenes fragment into ever-smaller and evermore obscure niches, it’s more exciting than ever to find bands of such quality playing in hidden spaces like this, and even more elating to see them pack those spaces out to crowds who are into it enough to go completely apeshit. Screw the mainstream, screw the capitalist agendas: this is where it’s at.
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