29 Sept 2017

GIGWISE Review Liverpool Festival

This is what they say: 

......Psych Fest, then, has had to pick from more quantity, but less quality in the last few years. It is to their immense credit that they’ve kept it challenging. The real outliers now lie at the heaviest end of the spectrum – the most furious, hard-hitting, and downright nasty acts, who are well represented across the two day assault. Gnod, for example, whose new album Just Say No To The Psycho Right-Wing Capitalist Fascist Industrial Death machine is one of the greatest things released in 2017, make a good example. Playing unlit in the dark, dingy District space, away from the larger warehouses, their set is bedlam and confrontation twisted into something cathartic and sublime. It lasts only half an hour, but by the time a closing blast of Bodies For Money with its manic seizure of a riff spins into view like a careening truck, it’s genuinely difficult to breathe, such is the brute force of one of the best bands in Britain today. District, it seems, is conducive to such brilliant batterings, for Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, who perform there the following day. Theirs is a set that’s similarly brutal, but unlike Gnod’s all-consuming opacity undercut with a twisted sense of grotesque fun. Frontman Matt Baty is a tight, bristling unit of blunt, concentrated energy, roaring over riff upon riff of repugnantly heavy guitars. Swigging Buckfast straight from the bottle as he goes, clambering around the amps and donning a shiny pink cowboy hat (“the most psychedelic thing I could think of,”) – he grips the gig with both hands, roaring through a titanic set that leaves a neck, still sore from Gnod, cricked into complete agony......

Read the full article here: Gigwise

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