THE BODY/FULL OF HELL
PETBRICK/THRESHOLD ENTITIES
THE DOME, LONDON
Hellish noisemongers join forces to exhilarating effect
that this double-handed headfuck can sell out the hangar-like Dome, but welcome to the wonderful world of heavy and it’s into the true meat of the night’s ordeal as quietly take the stage. Though singer/guitarist Chip King stands a foot back from his mic at all times, his ungodly shriek still cuts the humid air like a scythe, while drummer Lee Buford’s piston-like performance provides the focal point for the band’s whole set. Beyond the brief addition of Full Of Hell’s Samuel Di Gristine on sax, the band’s performance is thoroughly inward-focused, but just as it threatens to descend into mush something strange happens – meaninglessness becomes meaning, and the band’s hypnotic hate-sludge takes on a mesmeric quality like the hot thrum of blood in your veins. , by contrast, are crisp and dynamic as they surge through the likes of and . Frontman Dylan Walker is a chiropractor’s wet dream, cracking and contorting as he haemorrhages vitriol and goads the somewhat polite crowd into activity: “This is a new one,” he says drily at one point. “It’s about jumping off a stage.” Gradually the audience takes the bait and grows bolder, with a series of bodies tumbling like an avalanche loosed by the band’s noise-assisted grind eruptions. Things close out with the two bands coagulating to form a six-headed hell-presence, sloughing off large chunks of their own individuality to forge a whole new language. At its peak the industrialised assault seems to send a pained undulation through the crowd like an inverted, stomach-cramping Mexican wave, all while those standing shoulder to shoulder onstage appear, bizarrely, to be having the time of their lives.
