I’ve spoken about those “why didn’t anyone tell me about this band before?” moments that are actually, “I was told, but I just wasn’t paying enough attention”. The last time was Baroness, this time it’s a band very much of their ilk – Welsh rockers Taint. It’s perhaps a symptom of the fact that I’m by default deeply suspicious of melodic rock (no matter how heavy), especially if it comes from punkish roots (see this thread that goes some way to explaining why). I’m so easily bored by the stuff as it’s so often disposable and shallow. At a quick pass Taint could be bundled into the once glorious but now eternally soiled sub-genre uncomfortably labelled post-hardcore. Taint however are a different beast entirely, and All Bees to the Sea is the very case in point.

Taint clearly have a keen ear for melody. All Bees to the Sea, comprising of 4 tracks, is immediate in that sense. However, rather than shelter in cookie cutter naval gazing like much of the rest of the modern post-punk crowd, Taint have clearly been bathing in the sludge-groove experimentation of the likes of Baroness and Mastodon. These 4 razor sharp tracks display a deceptive amount of complexity that never overshadows the melodic punch. There’s a psychedelic air that at times evokes the spirit of 90’s psych-punk underdogs Warrior Soul, others the post-hardcore of Prong or Helmet. However, the EP’s true Baroness inflected beauty comes to fruition on the 12 minute prog-out that is the title track – super-sized and utterly satisfying.

All this in four songs – it’s quite remarkable. All Bees to the See is the sound of a band enjoying themselves and really flexing their creative muscle – I can’t wait to hear what they come out with next!

What I spent my hard earned cash on recently.

Worm Ouroboros – Worm Ouroboros
Canadian label Profound Lore’s obsession with eclecticism continues with the addition to their roster of Worm Ouroboros who could only be attributed to the metal genre in the broadest sense. By some definitions this could be considered post-rock, as many of these slow building tracks would stand firm without the vocals. However, the inclusion of the gorgeous female vocals provided by Lorraine Rath and Jessica Way help this transcend that oversubscribed genre and a strong folk influence sees this record floating dreamily between ethereal passages building to harder more metallic sections. There’s a sense of foreboding apparent throughout the record but it’s far from a being bleak affair. Both beautiful and haunting – a real triumph.

Cobalt – Gin
Cobalt’s vocalist/lyricist Phil McSorley can generally be found stationed with the US army in Baghdad. He’s not particularly fond of people and has seen some stuff that would mentally handicap most of the rest of us. So it’s not really surprising that Gin is a snarling, nihilistic affair. Bundling this in the Black Metal pigeonhole would be lazy, as there’s so much more here than the misanthropic BM stylings. The opening track Stomach is slimy, oozing sludge, while elsewhere we’re treated to doom, more traditional BM, proggy sections, and some good old fashioned riffathons. Ecclectic indeed, and thoroughly entertaining. Yet another gem in Profound Lore’s crown and one of the best albums of the past year.

Harvey Milk – s/t
Too many moons ago to mention the master tape of Harvey Milk’s first album was recorded and sent to a label who claimed to want to release the album. That tape, and as such the album, went into the void for the intervening years before being discovered, restored and turbo-charged. S/t is a frenzy of noise and fuzz and all out amplifier abuse, as you would expect from these noisenicks, and it sounds glorious.

Tombs – Winter Hours
Blackened hardcore? Why on earth not! Winter Hours sees Brooklyn’s Tombs trudge through bleak, nihilistic hardcore, interspersed with snarling BM passages. There’s melody and beauty within the cacophony and some slick songwiritng. Like a slightly less angry Cobalt, Tombs are taking the blackened arts into more (dare I say it) commercial climbs. Good on ‘em!

Teeth of the Sea – Hypnoticon
Teeth of the Sea’s Hypnoticon is tasty little EP of semi-electronic, droning, psychedelic rock. Sometimes evoking guitar prone electronica of groups like Propellerheads, while others moving into ambient jazz territory this is the cheery antidote to acts like To Blacken the Pages and Nadja. Fun, although not particularly essential.

Portal – Swarth
Portal’s grimy, messy and insalubrious music swelters and splutters like a corpse in a Brisbane sewer. Labelled death metal, this surreal and supremely ugly noise perhaps sits better within the BM camp (not least because of their creepy stage names and garb), however a disfigurement of the musical form such as this has seldom been achieved in that genre. There’s some real creativity in here and a dedication to sonic perversion that’s hard to knock. Swarth has a ramshackle charm and surrealist lyrics are at times hilarious, but it’s hard to see how someone could seriously enjoy listening to this. Seriously uneasy listening.

It may not be very metal to admit this, but I’ll pretend to be kvlt and not give a f*ck what you think – I go running several times a week. It’s a pastime that I actually quite enjoy. I do it as much for getting rid of anger and aggression as the calories I accrue from regular consumption of booze and lard, and for this reason heavy music is the perfect accompaniment to this solitary activity.

However, not any old heavy music will do for a good power jog. I listen to music while running for several reasons:

1. Distraction – it really helps me to forget about any pain or exhaustion and get into the meditative state
2. Noise – I find hearing my own breathing is a real reminder of the energy I’m expending which makes it feel more taxing
3. Passing the time – simply, it makes the time pass more quickly
4. Keeping rhythm and pace – it’s this I want to discuss in more detail

The music best suited for running needs to be a fairly constant, driving mid-tempo. This is because I tend to subconsciously match my pace to the beat of the music. Too slow and the effect is lost, and I generally find slows me down overall. Too fast and I risk tiring myself out too quickly, or simply not being able to match the pace. So Cathedral’s Forest Equilibrium is out, as is Slayer’s Angel of Death. Also, a very changeable tempo renders the overall effect useless. Subtle tempo shifts across longer tracks, or between tracks are very welcome (especially if you’re doing aerobic/anaerobic alternation), but spazzy stuff like Grindcore or the constant ebb and flow of Opeth is simply not up to the job, no matter how much I like it at any other time.

The other attribute I find helps immeasurably is aggression. Yes I could stick on a dance mix and achieve roughly the same effect with regards to tempo, but nothing beats balls to the wall angst to get you pounding the pavement.

What I’ve discovered is punk/hardcore is great for running to, as well as standard old school heavy metal and some hard/classic rock. Avoid anything drone or extremely down tempo and most doom, stoner, death, black.

Here’s my playlist for a 25 – 30 minute power jog. I start off slightly down tempo to get warmed up, and slowly wind up – this is how I like to structure my run (I find it easier to push myself at the end when the endorphins are flowing). The idea is to match your footfall to the tempo of the track.

The moderate start

High on Fire – Fury Whip

Ghost of a Thousand – Bright Lights

The mid-paced midsection

The Dillinger Escape Plan – Milk Lizard

Refused – Summerholidays vs Punk Routine

The sprint to the finish

Carcass – Heartwork

Black Sabbath – Neon Knights

(Disclaimer: I’m neither a fitness expert nor a personal trainer. I accept no responsibility for any damage you may do to yourself while using this playlist during recreational exercise. If you’re not an experienced runner, you should probably try and find other tracks of a similar tempo to tracks 1 and 2)

If anyone else has any recommendations of songs to run to then please let me know!

Merchandising!

There’s been a lot of banter about the relevance of album artwork in the digital age across the metal blogsphere (starting on Metalsucks, then moving to Invisible Oranges). The conversation has generally centered around whether the fans want/need/appreciate album artwork anymore. Many folks don’t buy CD’s or vinyl any more, and those that do often just rip the music for their iPod and file the hard copy away without paying much attention to the packaging or artwork. There are of course others who view an album as a package – 10 or so songs made to be together, with cover artwork, sleeve notes, lyrics etc. – and consume as a whole.

However, in many ways, whether the music buying public want, or feel that they need artwork or not is somewhat beside the point. The fact is, aside from the artistic concerns, artwork has a very practical purpose, which means it’s unlikely to disappear any time soon.

It’s unlikely that bands are going to stop releasing songs in ‘collections’. It makes financial sense to record multiple songs in one session, not to mention that extra cost it would take to promote and market 1 song at a time. Whether you call it an EP, Album or twozzlefangler, this collection will need to be identiified by a ‘label’ – the title – so that people can identify it. But from a marketing and promotional perspective this is simply not enough. This is, after all (wether you like it or not) a product, and products need to be distinct and easily recognisable. Imagine if all that was on every washing powder box was the brand name – no logo, design, mascot, product picture, gimmick - how would you identify one from the next? How would you remember which one was recommended to you, Washomatic or Cleanomatic? Branding professionals have known about differentiators for decades, and the music industry is no different. So bands often have logos, so that people can easily pick them out and identify with them. This is our fist visual cue. But that doesn’t do a very good job of differentiating one album from the next – enter the album artwork.

Death Metal art looks like this dude

At corporate level, all the elements of the album package from the songs, to the logo, to the title to the cover image, are carefully harmonised to portray a particular theme, image, tone. This is called merchandising and it’s take VERY seriously. Merchandising can make or break a record. This merchandising is taken through to marketing – adverts, PR, press kits, live show promotion and is usually reproduced to some level as part of the live show itself.

So when you get your mate to throw together some artwork for your latest EP this is what you are doing – merchandising. It means that you have a way to visually present your collection of songs, so that people can easily identify it in a shop among a bunch of other blackened deathcore CD’s, on Amazon or iTunes Store, and when flicking through the cover flow in their MP3 library. People are more likely to remember the distinctive cover design than the obscure latin album title or your unreadable BM logo.

Read my logo mofo!

It goes further than this though. Album artwork tends to be similar within genres. If you’re a Death Metal band, you probably want to be noticed by Death Metal fans. Death Metal album covers are usually striking, disturbing and immaculately painted by some some disturbed genius. Black Metal covers are usually sparse and colourless. Next time you leaf through Metal Hammer or Terrorizer take note of which adverts you notice – somehow it mysteriously aligns with your music taste…wonder why that is?

In the digital age, where visuals are everything, I’d say that album artwork is more important than ever. Whether you spent hours gazing at it (like I did with Iron Maiden’s Somewhere in Time artwork when I was a teenager), or merely used it as a reminder when looking for particular album, it had an impact on you, and fulfilled a vital need.

The greatest of them all

I don’t often act on (or in many cases listen to) unsolicited review requests that arrive via Myspace mail, but the one I received from Fuck the Facts caught my eye. Firstly, they actually bothered to personalise the message, secondly they offered to give out their tracks to anyone who would review (or in any way promote) them, and thirdly they mentioned that they were self releasing. I get countless grammatically dubious mails via Myspace (not to mention the ones via direct email, blog comments, etc.) that say something like “nice profile, hows trix check us out if you get a sec , if not that’s cool” (that’s a real one from a band who shall not be named) and expect me to bother spending time listening to, and reviewing their band when they can’t be bothered to even formally introduce themselves!

By chance I also saw Cosmo Lee’s review on Invisible Oranges so I decided to check them out. The music is an amusing mix of early Dillinger Escape Plan (minus the jazz/spazz) with elements of black and death metal (most notably Morbid Angel) which could broadly be described as Grindcore. A must for fans of Ted Maul and their ilk. It’s short, violent and to the point. Excellent stuff.

What’s more interesting is the way they are releasing it. They’re doing a limited run of  500 copies of the EP on vinyl, the packaging of which is hand made. Anyone who orders it gets a code to go download the the MP3’s for free. This is enterprising and very forward thinking and anyone who’s spent any time reading my overly impassioned musings on self releasing will know that I approve. It also has a real personal touch that will make the hard copies very collectable. The download mechanism is handled by a site called Bandcamp, which is totally new to me. You can stream your music and offer both free and paid downloads (including an option to off ‘pay what you want’) and well as generally promote your band. It’s an interesting service and one that I’m going to write a bit more about – watch this space.

So go give Fuck the Facts a leg up, because this this sort of behaviour should be rewarded!

For the uninitiated, Cloudkicker is one Ben Sharp from Columbus, Ohio. By day, Ben is a salary earning career man, by night a musical mad scientist. Cloudkicker’s percussive, polyrhythmic progressive metal is put together entirely on Sharp’s computer, with all instruments (and drums programmed) by the man himself. Cloudkicker’s music cost Sharp diddly squat to record.

Sharp releases short bursts of Cloudkicker’s music, given away free, to little fanfare. Currently there is 1 album and 3 EP’s, the latest of which is called ]]][[[ is both a continuation of Cloudkicker's trademark 'melodic Meshuggah' cacophany and a progression into both heavier and more melodic territories. Tracks 1 and 2 (which in keeping with the theme of grammatical symbols are named # and %) work as a single sprawling post-rocker, while track3 $ can only be described as post-thrash - frenetic, complex and stunningly original. Mr. Sharp kindly agreed to give me an interview.

Most would describe you as post-rock/metal, but you really stand out from the usual long song, slow build monotony. How would you describe your music?

I would describe it as "listenable". Anything beyond that is up to other people's musical sensibilities.

Do you consider yourself to be a part of any ‘scene’?

I consider myself a part of the "contributing member of society" scene, which is pretty exclusive as far as bands go.

You released 2 EP’s in a 12 month period. Was it a conscious decision to do that rather than release a full album?

I prefer putting out shorter releases more frequently. I get bored listening to an hour of instrumental music, and this way I always have something relatively new out.

Each of your releases has a distinct personality. Is this by design, or perhaps a reflection of your mood at the time?

Definitely the latter. I'm really moody when it comes to writing music, and I don't want to get caught up in some sort of creative rut where I'm ALWAYS writing within the confines of a certain style. Honestly, I'm getting bored of writing what amounts to being melodic Meshuggah but I still enjoy writing in odd time signatures, so I think applying that to some different styles will be interesting.

The title and song names of your current EP ]]][[[ only contain grammatical symbols. What is the significance of this?

Just mixing it up a bit. Usually I get a theme in my head or I'll be interested in a certain subject when I name songs but I wanted the music to be the focal point on this one. Also laziness.

Who’s the guy on the cover of ]]][[[ and why did you put him there?

I did a Google image search one time for the word “Black” and his picture popped up. I saved it on my computer and haven’t been able to find it since. I have no idea who he is, he could have committed mass infanticide for all I know. He just seems like a pretty solid dude, so why not put him on an album cover. I did color his garb though.

Your music almost seems defined by its rhythm. When you’re writing, is rhythm created before riff?

Sometimes. I’ve written some drum parts in the shower, but 70% of the stuff I come up with while noodling around on the guitar.

Have you considered releasing your music on physical formats and charging for it?

Eh. Sounds like a lot of effort. Some people seem to get really bent out of shape about the fact that they can’t buy a physical copy of the CD, and I think they’re probably somewhat OCD about it. I think it would be funny to sell CDs but have the artwork make it look like a regular blank CD-R.

Have you/will you ever consider making Cloudkicker into a full band?

I used to play shows back when I first started writing music for Cloudkicker in 2005-2006 and lived in Los Angeles. Since then I’ve taken on a career and moved to Ohio; I haven’t yet felt the need to hunt down capable musicians, practice, and put shows together. Instead I put that time and effort into writing music.

Well that’s good enough for me. Sharp’s chosen method of distribution, and the fact that he gives his music away free of charge, affords him this flexibility – the fans have no ownership over Cloudkicker, Sharp doesn’t need us, and thus artistic expression is allowed to flow unaltered by the malign influence of money. While the music industry bleats about loss of their poorly earned riches and foretell of the death of culture, Sharp and his ilk are out there proving that we no longer need these corporate wastes of space.

Cloudkicker’s entire back catalogue can be downloaded in its entirety for free here.

Things were going just hootingly for the music industry until someone invented MP3’s and spoilt the party. This advent was a veritable boon for the music listening public for whom music became more accessible and portable. It also became cheaper (or, in many cases free) and they weren’t tied to buying albums any more – they could choose which tracks to buy off an album leaving vast volumes of unwanted filler behind. This left the music industry, used to cleaning up by selling full, physical albums at exorbitant prices, somewhat out of pocket. The music industry has bleated, encrypted and litigated its way though the intervening decade before finally deciding to apply a bit of ‘creative’ thinking to the situation. “If they want files for these computer contraption thingies” they say, “let’s give them files”.

Several groups are developing new rich music media file formats that hope to take the act of listening to music into the multimedia age (apparently it didn’t arrive there yet). The resulting formats are, somewhat predictably, predominantly based around full albums. The music industry wants us to buy albums. Albums, they say, are meant to be listened to as a whole. Well that may be true if you’re Mastodon, but considerably less so if you’re Peter André. Reading between the lines of the industry rhetoric it’s clear the bottom line is the order of the day – albums are a lot more profitable. Each of these attempts to recreate the experience of an album in digital format and enrich it further with other extras. So the ‘race’ is on to become the next ubiquitous file format. There are 3 contenders in this valhallan battle. Here I’ll cover each separately.

The iTunes LP

To be fair to Apple, who have benefited no end from the digital revolution, there are no smoke and mirrors surrounding their attempt to digitise the LP experience (hence the name). They clearly want to sell more albums. They also realise that the music industry do also, but they have other ideas as we shall discover. Launching an iTunes LP file submerses you in a multimedia world themed around the artist and album. Along with the music (at standard ACC superior 192kbps quality) you get music videos, custom visualisations, album artwork and lyrics. All this in a swanky interactive environment inside iTunes. Although the music files will run on Apple’s iPod or iPhone range, the full multimedia experience won’t, although it may run on the forthcoming chocolate teapot known as the iPad. Inside the file is an assortment of images and Javascript that, although fathomable for someone with some web development skill, is poorly documented and probably out of reach of all but the majors.

Being the only format already to make it market (launched August 2009) would seem to give them a head start on the pack. However, this evidently hasn’t translated into a resounding success, which is perhaps a sign of the music buying public’s nonchalance regarding such a format, but more likely to be related to the fact that the music industry has something else on the burner and are thus not wasting time releasing on iTunes LP’s. Which bring me on to…

CMX

Dubbed CMX (Connected Media Experience – snappy eh?) the music industry’s apparoach to this concept was to club together and throw a bunch of their ill-gotten cash at it. Originally scheduled to launch around the same time as the iTunes LP, presumably to cut them off at the pass, this has now been delayed until ‘quarter 2 2010’. We don’t know the precise details but we do know just enough to say that it is conceptually virtually the same as the iTunes LP, however, already there are obvious flaws that hobble it out of the starting blocks. Firstly, it’s Flash based, so it won’t play on an iPod, and initially probably not on any portable media player. Given the ubiquity of the last decades must have electronic accessory it’s hard to see how CMX can catch on. Secondly, it looks likely that the music will only be playable as part of the CMX file. Which means that it won’t function in iTunes, and you can’t put them on your MP3 player either!

This is still speculation given that the details of CMX have yet to be released. However, given that Apple are unlikely to support this format, and the music industry will not be quick to forsake a format that they’ve poured a load of cash into we would seem to be at a stalemate. But there is a 3rd way…

MusicDNA

The new kid on the block it may be, but MusicDNA was created by one of the very arch-criminals responsible for this bloody mess in the first place – Karlheinz Brandenburg co-creator of the MP3. Unlike the iTunes LP and CMX, MusicDNA isn’t merely a repackaging of the digital file format into an album like experience, it has a whiff of the future about it. You see MusicDNA has smarts. It carries a bunch of metadata as per the MPEG-7 standard which carry information on stuff like tempo, instrumentation, mood as well as all the usual stuff, all captured at the point of encoding. This will allow applications like iTunes and services like Pandora and Last.fm to create weird, wonderful, and most importantly, powerful ways to recommend and playlist stuff for you. Also, the MusicDNA file is alive. It contains dynamic components that update when the file is opened. This will allow artists to include stuff like tour dates and blog posts that would always be up to date. You can copy (read pirate) MusicDNA files, and they will play just fine, however this dynamic content will no longer function, a feature which the makers say will help guard against piracy. I’m not so sure.

MusicDNA comes with a plethora of applications to encode and run, as well as the facilities for developers to build their own applications to make use of all its magical features (like iPhone and Facebook apps). It’s also MP3 backwards compatible which means it should play on anything that will play MP3’s (although I’ll believe this when I see it). Although the format made it to market (well, it’s not quite in the wild yet, but has ‘launched’) before the tardy CMX format it currently has no backing from the major labels (although a couple of independent labels are on board) and is unlikely to get it until CMX is abandoned or fails. So, short of a sudden upswell of public demand, MusicDNA would seem to be at a bit of handicap.

The question is, does the world really need a rich, album based file format? Albums are more and more becoming the bastion of hardcore fans, music lovers/collectors and audiophiles. In all cases, owning a physical copy of the album is usually the order of the day. In the latter two, audio quality is a key concern, something that none of these formats tackle. Barring the spaceage extras that accompany MusicDNA, all these extras are already available, usually offered as a DVD, with premium copies of the physical equivalents, so immediacy is all they’ve really got going for them. It’s difficult to see this becoming a Betamax vs. VHS or HD DVD vs. Blue Ray style standoff – all those formats offered features not previously available. MusicDNA is the only format with the differentiators to make it a viable alternative to the ubiquitous MP3 (and indeed AAC), but are these value adds really enough to sway the hardcore as well as change the general record buying public’s buying habits? It seems unlikely.

In addition to this, there are signs that the MP3 itself could soon become obsolete as vast numbers of music consumers are moving to increasingly mobile streaming services like (music industry sponsored) Spotify.

The final nail in these foetus’s coffins is the fact that these files will almost certainly be charged at a premium. Given that the music buying public are hard pressed to pay anything for their music, it seems a stretch to expect them to fork out more. When you add to that the fact that, due to the extra effort and expense (not to mention expertise) involved in producing these formats, smaller record labels and self releasers will unlikely bother, these formats would seem to be a lost cause.

In the end, all this talk of recreating the album experience is somewhat moot. It’s unlikely that CD’s and vinyl are likely become obsolete any time soon and simply recreating this experience in digital form is fulfilling a need that doesn’t exist for anyone other than the record labels. Albums have a place in the future of music consumption, but it’s not the form that the music takes that is going to evolve, it’s very way we discover and experience music. I’ll tackle this in subsequent articles.

If I handed over an unlabeled copy of Myth and said “what you have here is the lost Opeth album. You know, the one that was recorded just after Blackwater Park and was collaboration with Katatonia but was never released” the less acquainted Opeth acolytes out there may well believe me on hearing it.

It’s impossible to talk about Stone Circle without mentioning Opeth – their debt to the Swedish masters is plain. However, the Brighton quartet aren’t simply a carbon copy. While Opeth tend towards 70’s prog groove and bleak, black metal atmospherics, Stone Circle bludgeon us with brutal death reminiscent of Morbid Angel melting into plaintive Katatonia-esque goth rock. Lacking the history and maturity of either band Myth doesn’t traverse the aggressive and melancholic as smoothly as Opeth and lacks the gothic majesty of Katatonia. That said there is some exemplary song writing here – moments of crushing heaviness and emotionally charged melody knitted together with a dark lyrical narrative. Epic, progressive and complex, Myth reaches musical highs most of their contemporise can only dream of.

Any criticism seems harsh when you consider that Stone Circle are unsigned Myth is entirely self released. This seems unjust given that the labels will rush out to sign 2nd rate carbon copies of bands who sell a couple of thousand units. The fact that a band of Stone Circle’s quality hasn’t been signed yet is as clear a sign of the skittishness of the music industry currently as you’ll see. Myth is accomplished and genuinely compelling. Stone Circle will need to step out from Opeth’s stately shadow to really stand out, but with the talent on display here I can’t imagine that this will be too difficult.

Like a slimy, oozing spectre crawling out from the fetid depths of a swamp, Thee Big Black issue 3 has arrived. As if it wasn’t enough to offer another 20 odd pages of dark majesty entirely free, we’ve managed to beg/borrow/steal a couple of mp3’s from the marvelous Stone Circle and sludgetastic Funeral Hag for your enjoyment that you’ll find lurking in the download file. This month it’s a veritable extravaganza of unearthly delights, including an interview with Sons of Alpha Centauri and a piece on the the Triffids vs The Middle Class by yours truly. You need this, so go get it tiger!

Download Thee Big Black issue 3 with free MP3’s here.

As always, feel free to come and join the conversation on Thee Big Black forum and feel your very existence be enriched!

The tonic qualities of booze and great live music should not be underestimated. Turning up at this gig when I really should have been at home attempting to battle the wee germs assaulting my body was perhaps ill advised, but I wasn’t going to miss Baroness live now was I?

The support provided by indescribably dire metal-or-some-such-bollocks-core Sondura did nothing to help my frail state. In intent, this formulaic tripe could not be further removed from Baroness. At best ignored and at worst booed by the crowd, by the end of their dire set I was wondering whether I’d make it as far as Baroness. For purely medicinal purposes I chucked back a shot of JD and stood firm.

I’m glad I did. The unassuming Georgians, who uttered not a word until the very end of their set, hypnotised the audience with their frantic intensity and epic heaviness. Singer/Guitarist John Baizley has become somewhat of an icon as the artistic lynchpin of the sludge stoner groove (whatever you want to call it) movement occupied by the likes of Kylesa and Torche. Standing before the diminutive, bearded one was like being in the presence of greatness – this was like watching a band fronted by Vincent van Gough.

Baroness delivered almost entirely unbroken set comprised largely of tracks lifted from the Red and Blue albums. The Baizley/Adams psychedelic guitar assault delivers precision tempered by occasional improvisational flourishes that are the hallmark of a really great live act. But Baroness aren’t showy, Baizley and crew seemed utterly emerged in these gargantuan riffs and progressive noodlings – here, the music does the talking, not the band.

The only disappointment of the evening was the omission of the brilliant Rays on Pinion, but the inclusion of a rousing rendition of Grad and The Birthing. Prior returning for an encore Baizley finally broke bands silence with a long, largely inaudible ramble about how London held a special place in their hearts and they are humbled by our support or something. Awww. Please come back lots more Mr. Baizley.

It seems a travesty that Baroness are playing such small venues when they deserve to be playing arenas. Alas, they are one of those bands that will probably never make it really big, but will constantly be cited by bands, bad and good, as a massive influence and clueless fans will pretend they always liked them.

By the end of it I felt pretty much ‘cured’ and when awoke in the morning, despite a mild hangover, was largely free of my ailment. Thank you Baroness – now can you get to work on the verruca I’ve got on my toe?