Blown Out – Rainbow Grave – Mothwasp – Birmingham Sunflower Lounge – live review

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Blown Out – Rainbow Grave – Mothwasp – Birmingham Sunflower Lounge – 6th of August 2015

Newcastle’s Blown Out features members of BONG, Drunk In Hell, Haikai No Ku, 11Paranoias, Khunnt. Birmingham’s Rainbow Grave features members of Napalm Death, Scorn, Sore Throat and Doom.  Fighting Boredom’s Adrian Bloxham and Martin Ward would like to share a review of a dark night last year.

This place is small, a tiny cellar bar, there are red lights on the stage at the back. We arrive as Mothwasp start, a duo with drums, guitar and samples. The drummer plays like someone doomed, it’s heavy as an anvil and madly repetitive with a bass sound. But I don’t know if that’s the guitarist or a sample making this into pitch black broken funk. The guitar moves from sounding like a tolling bell, endless and echoing to broken noises scattered around fast, incessant beats. Their darkness matches the room perfectly. Their music is built around the samples that fill the space, it sounds improvised but is too tight to be just jamming, a good start to the evening.

Rainbow Grave have roots in Napalm Death, Scorn, Sore Throat and Doom and they are the reason I came out tonight. They describe themselves as ‘Low Rent Cave Man Hate Music’. They aren’t just saying that either, they start the set with a mass of feedback and Nic Bullen leans into the mic to state, ‘I dream of a better world, one without you.’ It sounds nasty, grinding and hard, it’s a massive negative sound.

It negates everything, at one point in 10 Million tons of shit they go through a list of what they hate about you, ‘I hate your pets’ being my favourite, although I’m not sure favourite is the right word. The vocals are harsh and cold but you can understand every word. Nic delivers them with venom, looking alternately hideously angry and just plain bored. The rest of the band just concentrates on playing the tight loud noise. The slow funereal pace of one song matches the lyrics about lost childhood dreams. It’s slow and cold. ‘It’s not much of a life’ relentlessly hopeless with a spark of very black humour.

Blown Out are a trio and they are bloody young, so young that they almost look out of place. However, once they start playing it’s like a kick to the groin. They play long, psyched out massive slabs of music, they lock into a groove and keep it going until it has run its course, they fill the room with an intense mass of repetition and weight which runs on and on. It’s mean and hard music.

Keep your eyes open for Blown Out, but really try and catch the bleak and bile filled Rainbow Grave.

All words by Adrian Bloxham, all pictures by Martin Ward.

 

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