Ohhms
My last proper gig was way back in March 2020. Since then, there have been online shows and a couple of seated test events at NAC but, enjoyable as they were, they couldn’t match the visceral, sweaty thrill of a gig where standing – hell where DANCING – is allowed. After so long, this was always going to be a weird, unsettling experience for me and so it proved: when the moshing got too much, I lurked behind a plant in a recess to stage left but I wouldn’t have missed this for the world.
There are gentler reintroductions to live music than KULK. This was fairly restrained by Tom and Jade’s usual standards - with Tom staying on stage and keeping hold of his guitar throughout – but sonically they were as fierce and fearsome as ever. Channelling the likes of Gnod, early Swans and the heavier end of the anarchopunk movement, the duo don’t so much play songs as murder them with bludgeoning riffs, pounding drums, feedback and distortion and that is a very good thing indeed.
Norwich’s NERVEWRECKER are, by their own admission, a doom metal band. That may be so but this is more Amenra than Candlemas, adding sporadic blasts of d-beat and forays into both old school thrash and contemporary black metal. Vocalist Ed is a compelling presence, stomping around like a vein poppingly angry Sasquatch intent on stamping through both the stage and the floor to the bar below. A new one on me but I’ll definitely try to see Nervewrecker again.
If I am honest, what I’ve heard of OHHMS studio work is OK but it doesn’t really grab me. Live is a totally different proposition and they played an absolute blinder. There is a superficial affinity to Pigs X7 or Part Chimp but Ohhms distance themselves with tinges of hardcore/post-hardcore and Chainy’s occasional slap bass. Chainy seems to spend more time in the crowd than on the stage, even moving his –massive – pedal board from the stage to the floor. Towards the end of the set, Paul loses his voice and spends the last two songs in the crowd, even being dragged into a small but extremely enthusiastic circle mosh.
None of these three bands will ever challenge the mainstream. That is not what they are about. What they offer is volume and heaviness and, after the last seventeen months, some much needed cathartic fun. Yes, I may have ended up hiding away as close to the stage but as far away from the more enthusiastic members of the crowd as I could get but I spent the whole gig smiling. I’m still not sure that we are over the worst that COVID has got or that going to gigs is wholly sensible but, by all that is holy and all that is unholy, I needed this sooooo much. Thanks to Ben and everyone at Voodoo Daddy’s, promoters Everything Is Fine, the three bands and the rest of the crowd for making this such a great return to gigs.
