Live Review : Damnation Festival on November 2th 2024 (Part II)

Fuming mouth are a dark twisted entity slamming together sludge and doom and then shoving it into a blender with a big handful of unrepentant crust punk. They crackle with raw energy and hum with disenfranchised righteous anger. Their riffs brim with bile and belligerence and it has an unconformity to it that feels refreshing and different. It's like they know the rules of metal but have decided that they don't quite apply to them. Instead, they are using it well-worn clichés to tread a different path and that sense of individualistic endeavour shines through.

FleshtivalsAuthor : Stewart Lucas8 November 2024BEC ArenaDecapitated, Cult Of Fire, LLNN, Mizmor, A Swarm Of The Sun, Morne, Underdark, NornaComment

Live Review : Damnation Festival on November 2th 2024 (Part I)

Last year's Damnation Festival was pretty much perfect and I'm sure that would be the opinion of almost everyone. The single dissenting voice you would find are probably the organisers as the uncomfortable fact is whilst it was a faultless affair for those attending, it just about scraped itself to breakeven and another year of negative growth would potentially spell the end of this miraculous experiment in putting extreme metal in an arena. Needless to say the thousand plus tickets that flew out the door on the Monday after last year's event showed that there definitely was a market for witnessing insular bands in a widescreen environment.

FleshtivalsAuthor : Stewart Lucas7 November 2024BEC ArenaDecapitated, Cult Of Fire, LLNN, Mizmor, A Swarm Of The Sun, Morne, Underdark, NornaComment

Live Review : Damnation Festival 'A Night Of Salvation' on November 1st 2024

There is something ornamental and ritualistic about an album playing in full. Usually sets are a Russian roulette of endless probabilities. For a band with a healthy back catalogue there is an existential dread that the next song is either going to be one that you don't like or even worse the dreaded "one from the new album”. A playback of a legendary album takes away all of that uncertainty and instead becomes a musical installation, an art form frozen in time. You are plunged into a warm bath of familiarity where you know exactly what's coming next. This comfort blanket approach is especially true of albums that are very much of their time or define a specific moment, era or movement. Hearing those songs again in exact order that you would have listened to them on vinyl/CD/minidisk/personal stereo (delete as applicable) offers a gateway into the past allowing the listener to reconnect with their younger selves.

Live Review : Bloodstock Festival on August 13th 2023

And just like that it’s Sunday and that great stretch of metal that was laid out before us, has now just shrunk to a single day. But what a single day and how many blooming people have turned up to join us! From the get-go, the place is heaving and it feels very obvious that the site has reached its 25,000 cap.

Bloodstock : 30 Bands Not To Miss - Decapitated

Decapitated are essentially Bloodstock’s house band. Omnipresent (I gave up trying to count how many times they have appeared) they are the last word in muscular, well-oiled death metal.

FleshtivalsAuthor : Stewart Lucas29 July 2023Bloodstock Festival 2023Bloodstock, Decapitated, 2023Comment

Live Review : Damnation Festival 2022 - Part III

The terms seminal and genre defining are probably thrown around too much these days but the work of Godflesh, and in particular debut album ‘Streetcleaner’, deserves those accolades and more. It’s therefore almost unbelievable to experience the band performing the album in full after all these years. The anticipation prior to opener ‘Like Rats’ is palpable and, once some feedback and sound difficulties are overcome, it’s a joyous ride through what is a very important set of tracks from the late 80’s that has undoubtedly shaped the very fabric of industrial metal ever since.