Noise Road

I’m hacking at this French/Arabic keyboard from what must be the dope capital of Morocco.  Here in Chefchaouen, I’ve been offered hash by 13 locals in just over 24 hours.  When they try to sell you carpets in Morocco, they invite you in for mint tea, “no obligation to buy”, and then the hard sell comes.  It’s the same with hash in Chefchaouen – except it’s not mint tea that they are offering for you to sample….

 

A few days previous, I was amongst the subterranean pillars of the Underground in London, for death metal blueprinters, Suffocation. 

It had been a busy few weeks in the UK leading up to the Suffocation gig.  My budget to make it through to the Wacken Open Air Festival in August was already starting to look a little stretched.  And then my laptop died.

Most disappointingly, it didn’t even fail in a spectacular way.  After hauling the weight of a laptop for 4 months through the snow of Scandinavia and the sketchy streets of Chicago, you’d think I’d at least get a somewhat interesting story from its demise.  But no. Sadly there was no interesting story about my computron being stolen from a Brussels hostel room, or my laptop shattering after being dropped down a flight of stairs in a Glaswegian B&B.  Very boringly, the moulded-in chip set failed 2 months out of warranty.  Feck you, Sony.  Feck you up the @rse.

 

I started chasing a few hours of work to keep the Wacken dream alive and to maybe to replace the laptop.  My options were either giving wristies to Japanese tourists under London Bridge, or a return to my corporate wh0ring ways.  So after 4 months of wearing my backpacking/gigging uniform of faded and frayed jeans, tired converses and my trusty Dillinger hoodie, I spent a couple of days in a suit in Portsmouth and Southampton trying to coax a few pounds out of some local engineering firms.

It was a long couple of days.  The meetings were drawn out and full of the usual empty promises.  Selling your soul is a time consuming business.  Consequently I didn’t get in to Camden until the third band of the evening, Nervecell (from Dubai!), had already boarded the stage. 

I’d forgotten just how much fun you could have at a death metal gig.  Nervecell kicked off a night of raw enthusiasm and raucous joy – both from the crowd and the stage. 

There was no doubt that Nervecell were happy to be there and that the crowd was more than happy to have them.  Sometimes the opening bands for such a seminal act as Suffocation can be met with an unsympathetic crowd.  However there were no turned backs, or crossed arms tonight… Sure the average blood alcohol level of the floor helped, but the crowd definitely appreciated the energy that Nervecell brought to their set.

I must admit after having a trying few days, I was imbibing a few pints of Carling myself.  So you’ll have to forgive me, if these words represent an overview of the experience rather than a detailed blow by blow account.

 

Local lads Annotations of an Autopsy kept the death metal train rolling for the evening.  Soundcheck has been a short and smooth process for every other gig that I’ve been to in London.  Soundcheck for Annotations lasted for a good 20 minutes while the booze-fueled vocalist asked the crowd for soccer chants of “Chelsea!” and “Arsenal!”, whilst abusing the sole Tottenham supporter.

I had not previously heard any of Annotations’ work, but I enjoyed watching them from alongside the mixing desk.  There was a constant stream of stage divers throughout their performance.  It was like watching a Napalm Death video from 1989.  The vocalist even took to launching the kids off the stage with wrestling throws.  Samoan drops and suplexes… the dude had a full repertoire of WWE moves.  It was like watching a death metal Chris Benoit (except for the whole murdering of his wife and child thing).

That morning, I’d accidentally packed my camera for the flight the next day to Casablanca.  So the crappy camera on my phone would have to do for the evening’s photos.  But halfway through the Annotations set my phone stopped responding.  First the laptop fails me… and now the phone.  Ted Kaczynski was right… 

But what can you do?  Best to just shrug the shoulders, head to the bar, drink in double time and head down to the floor for some premium quality metal. 

Anyways as a result of the evils of technology, there are no photos of Suffocation at all in this post.  Which is a shame, because frontman, Frank Mullen’s performance was so animated that a photo could have captured the spirit in the room.  The man has charisma that you can’t learn. 

Cosmo Lee at Invisible Oranges has talked about Frank Mullen’s signature move, the chop (or Mullen’s death metal spirit fingers to the blastbeats).  It’s a participation sport these days – the crowd often join in with the chop.  Frank’s face shows that he is genuinely feeling the music.  He slaps his face, shakes his head.  And the banter introducing songs is hilarious…

Mullen often referred to the crowd as “my friends”, but then he qualified what he meant by friends “I say friends, but don’t come around knocking at my door at 2am…  cos I will shoot you… and I mean it”.  I couldn’t stop laughing.

The rest of the band are able to exude energy without much movement.  It’s in the sound that they create.  A euro type in the crowd explained to me that Suffocation are the perfect mix of technical and brutal.  And I think the “brutal” is the energy that is conveyed.  The music is complicated and interesting – but the energy of an element of grind comes though.

On a side note, that exchange with the euro type wasn’t my favourite conversation of the night.  Earlier in the evening, when I was studying the merch table, a local gent bumped into me, causing me to spill a few drops of my drink.  He said “sorry, geezer”.  I’ve finally been called a geezer by a local in the UK.  I have nothing left to accomplish in this country.

But back to the gig…

I believe that all albums were represented on the night, though I did have a few more in the belly than usual, and I won’t pretend to have been a devout Suffocation fan since birth.  The material of the new album was the highlight for me.  Blood Oath has been high on my rotation in the lead up to the gig, and on the night the title track was huge.  Mullen straight faced told us that we need to make sure that we had more bullets than our neighbor because Cataclysmic Purification was coming. 

The set was not without technical difficulties though.  The most significant being a bass string requiring change out mid set.  What this reinforced for me is that live music is not about perfect sound.  It’s not about your equipment working perfectly.

The crowd were giving Suffocation everything.  The floor was full, the kids (including the vocalist from Annotations) up the front were stage diving. And the band were giving it back.  I love the Underworld.  It’s a dank dungeon of a place – with severely obscured views and far from perfect acoustics.  But the Underworld has atmosphere.  The crowd that night was just keen to have a good night.  And isn’t that why you go out to a show? Suffocation were suffering technical difficulties, but were still able to convey the music to a crowd eager to grasp it…  Or maybe I had just drunk too many Carlings.

Either way.  I had a fantastic night.  Feck corporations screwing you round.  Feck your computer and then phone dying on you.  How can you be unhappy after a great night of death metal?

I grabbed a yiros across the road from the venue and tubed to a heathrow budget hotel.  I had two hours sleep and headed to the airport for the flight to Casablanca.  Life is good.

This entry was posted on April 11, 2010 at 1:36 am and is filed under Gigs with tags Annotations of an Autopsy, Camden, London, March 2010, Nervecell, Suffocation, the Underworld. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.