Monthly Archives: April 2014

MUTATION: Error 500

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EXTREME ATTENTION–DEFICIT METAL

Someone puts a CD on – summat loud, brutish, fast. He or she is trying to find a track which they’ll recognise the second they hear it, but YOU know different because of their chronic SMS (shit memory syndrome). Play is pressed and you get a few seconds of metallic battery. Not it. FF flick to the next track. Another blast. Not it. Skip again. More noise. Nope, skip. Half a riff, NO. Skip. Maybe it was the first one after all? Skip back. No. ffs. FF again.

Jarred by this rapido assault of unconnected riffs, your senses are mashed. You don’t know what’s next or what went before coz you’ve been denied the time to process any of it. There’s no pattern to snag, not even a rhythm to follow, and your brain can’t keep up.

This is what Error 500 feels like – 9 tracks of mutant-bastard billion-guitar chaos, pinballing not so much between styles but between riffs, tempos and strobe-light madness to create a monstrous pile-up WITHIN every track. Disorienting stuff for sure, but who’s responsible for this barrage of ADD metal? What is MUTation?

MUTation is a Ginger (Wildhearts)-led project and this record is part two of a rumoured three-album lifespan. Napalm Death’s Shane Embury is in it, Cardiacs’ Jon Poole is in it, as are many others. Merzbow pops up. More bizarrely, Mark E Smith – yes, that one (is there any other?) – shambles in for two stagger-on cameos, shouting about shoelaces like a daylight drunk.

Does any of this give a sense of where Error 500 is going?

If not, the disjointed assembly of opening track Bracken surely does, a well-heavy/insane mash of what sounds like 5 different tracks in the first minute. Utopia Syndrome carries on the cut-and-paste attack. By the time White Leg flings a carousel spin in there, your ears begin to whisper for a lie down … not because of volume or extremity in itself, we love all that, but because of over-stimulus and the pace of change. Error 500 is a twisted hybrid of Napalm Death, Devin Townsend and Battles body parts, stitched together with Zappa thread and sparked to life by a Meshuggah defibrillator.

Little wonder, then, that it finds a home on Ipecac.

Unlike collaborations such as Shrinebuilder, where the very-brilliant sum is clearly derived from its Om/Neurosis/St Vitus component parts, or even labelmates Palms who evolve the Isis blueprint into celestial realms, MUTation is more in the Patton/Fantomas/Bungle mould – a total annihilation of the familiar and the expected. It’s a combustion. Highlights are impossible to list because the whole thing – as a statement – is a deranged highlight, though the Napalm-heavy channel-flicking Protein is a fave of mine. Over to you to pick your own bits.

Anything goes in MUTation world, and though it’s nothing like the Wildhearts, it’s everything like their spirit: technicolour, exuberant, volatile, smiling and rammed with fuck-it attitude … a gloriously demented racket. BRING THE NOISE.

Mutation: Error 500 (Ipecac, 2013)

 

 

 

OLD MAN GLOOM – live@the Scala, London, April 2014

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In some ways, there’s not much to say about Old Man Gloom tonight.

They’ve put out some stupendous albums – especially Seminar II (here’s a review I put on Head Heritage a few years back), Seminar III: Zozobra and Christmas – and their pedigree is first class so what can you demand of a rare-as-feck appearance in Blighty beyond, well, just showing up?

Nothing more than volume, reverberation and gut-blowing intensity – and that’s exactly what we get. OMG hit it for an hour at the Scala and they hit it HARD, starting with the opener of all openers – The Gift’s multi-part slow-build – and blasting through new and back-catalogue extractions like Branch Breaker, Regain/Rejoin, Sleeping with Snakes and Common Species. Aaron Turner, wildman unkempt, is animated far beyond the close-cropped intensity of Isis and maybe that’s because OMG trade in the primal and the primordial rather than the celestial. OMG are a seismic force.

Then the biggie. Zozobra is fired up 20 minutes from showtime’s end … Zozobra. Yes. NO WAY. No bloody way.  Seminar III: Zozobra is exalted ground, the mother of all OMG, and hearing those opening strands on this already-special UK outing is an omg OMG moment in itself.

It takes its time, we know this. Intro becomes build becomes pummel becomes squall becomes … a different track.

Whaaaaaaat?????? NO. WAY. The climactic guitar payoff, the extended post-fury euphoria, the colossal big ender, is choked off pre gush. Shit.  It’s a momentary downer in an otherwise triumphant bruiser of a set.

Now, a quick word about the supports: Bossk surge and swell with hypnotic Cult of Luna dynamics, and Finland’s Circle … well, I’ve no idea what they are on. What do you do with a band who sport dayglo gym shirts and ham up the rock theatrics with heroic metal poses, guitars held aloft and onstage duels? Circle look like Spinal Tap doing an Olivia Newton-John video.

Musically … again, no idea. Speed. Top-of-the-range metal vocals. Progressive musical chops and song structures. Catchy hooks and riffs. If Helloween grew up on post black metal as well as the trad power of Maiden, and chewed on the brains of Yes, Zappa and Devin Townsend, then … I dunno. After a short interlude they emerge sans fitness togs but each now clad in the cheapest, lowest-budget metal threads, like an 8 year olds’ primary school of rock – a single studded armband, a ripped T-shirt, a pair of black leather kecks bursting under a hefty belly  – and continue their avant metal. THAT’S entertainment.