Tag Results: the quietus
The Quietus Live Review: Chelsea Wolfe Roadburn Festival
“I was about to call it a day when, on the way out of the venue, my attention was caught by a siren’s wail, and I was drawn inexorably to the Green Room, the 013’s middle venue. Chelsea Wolfe’s mix of shoegaze swirls and satanic swamp-rock stomp was totally, irresistibly enthralling (and I missed the last train home as a result.) It’s these kind of discoveries that Roadburn is built upon. Just by chance, you’ll stumble across a performance from a band who’ll be your new favourite thing for the next 12 months, then you come back here, and you start the process all over again.”
The Quietus : Big Riffs At Close Quarters - And So I Watch You From Afar Interviewed
The Northern Irish quartet arrived on a wave of confidence and unity, but after a year peppered with international acclaim and broken bones they lost their founding guitarist. Kiran Acharya spoke to the band about the recording of second album Gangs
I’d finally settled on a functional introduction the whole story changed. Tony Wright left the band, replaced by Panama Kings guitarist Niall Kennedy. Despite this, And So I Watch You From Afar’s second album Gangs would still be released in the USA by Sargent House, home to Russian Circles, Hella and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez. And Wright, rolling solo, was already performing as VerseChorusVerse, teaming up to tour the UK with Jonah Matranga, previously of Far. Then Wright rejoined And So I Watch You for a single performance at the Ulster Hall in Belfast. It was a final farewell and also a celebration because they’d just been named Best Live Act in the first Northern Irish Music Awards.
The Quietus: Relentless Raw Movement: Death Grips Interviewed
Death Grips are the singularly most exciting new thing we have heard in 2011. John Calvert asks Flatlander about their methodology, hip hop, Odd Future, California and mental illness. Image courtesy Death Grips.
Brutal, bodacious, ugly like twisted-metal, obnoxious as a shot-out kneecap, completely barmy. Lightning Bolt are great aren’t they? If only they made hip hop like that. And as if by magic… For a neat description of Death Grips’ ungodly racket you need only take a stroll through MC Ride’s diseased mind, essentially the de facto setting for the West Coasters’ Exmilitary, the most scintillatingly confrontational hip hop album to emerge in years. Between foretelling divine wrath, blatting out nightmarish free associative imagery and remonstrating with nearby squirrels, the interfacial, disembodied MC Ride - a damned soul in a twisted bind - will proffer the odd phrase perfectly in step with the acid bath terror-ride unfolding around him. It might be in the context of eating a dead dog he found behind the house, but there’s something self-reflexive about talk on ‘Guillotine’ of “relentless raw movement” and “hidden art, between and beneath” or “serial number, killing machine…stomp music seriously!” - the later of which more or less nails it. Put’ em all together and you get the idea: murder spelt backwards is MC Ride and if pain be the great educator, it’s back to school with you. Guillotine… Yah!
Bona fide hip hop phenoms, MC Ride, Mexican Girl, Info Warrior, back-room tsar Flatlander and polymath drummer Zach Hill are collectively the masterminds behind what after three months of listening still seems like a freak occurrence in the genre. Exmilitary reboots the very form itself, engineering an unconstructed, wires-exposed killing machine for the despatching of rap’s moneyed dandies, and a constant, indeed relentless source of delight for extreme music fans. The purest affront on cashmoney culture you could conceive of, their incendiary mixtape outguns, outwits and quite simply puts to shame their domesticated counterparts in the trebly heights of chintzy Diamante-rap.
