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Hooray, it’s Easter day, and what better way to celebrate this fine Christian festival than with some Pagan-entrench, ear-splitting, idol-worshipping, kick-ass stoner-metal? Swedish four piece Witchcraft peddle their heavily Sabbath influenced wares in front of an already near capacity crowd with brilliant results. These lanky, long haired, unkempt lads look and sound like someone has literally scooped them out of a smoke filled Scandinavian garage circa 1970 and flung them indiscriminately into the future. And by the sounds of things, they have no intention of catching up at all – with a mixture of songs in Swedish and English, Witchcraft combine brutally loud riffs, with lazily placed drum fills to make for a hang-banging opening set befitting of any metal gig.
Texan metallers, The Sword continue in very much the same vein - with enough hair on stage to provide lustrous wigs for all of the aging bald rockers in tonight’s crowd, the four-piece churn out elongated live versions of their tracks, such as 'Winter's Wolves' and 'Barael's Blade', that seem to turn into loose jams of prog-metal experimentalism. It’s always nice to see bands play about with tracks and genuinely enjoy the live experience, but these drawn out interludes can become self-indulgent, leaving little for the riff-hungry audience to get their teeth into.
Good job Clutch show no signs of slowing down. To look at, Clutch have always been the most unlikely bunch of metallers – a motley bunch of podgy, cumbersome looking chaps, and geeky skinny little waifs who probably met through mutual knowledge of posture correcting school shoes, or love of very hard sums. Their music, however, paints a very different picture.
Combining a sloppy blues backbone, thrashingly volatile guitar licks and some complex time signatures, Clutch are certainly not your average rockers. Stomping his way around stage like a full-bearded angry toddler, lead singer Neil Fallon wails in the very truest sense of the word, somehow drowning out the dangerously loud guitars. New bangers such as 'You Can't Stop the Progress', from recent album 'From Beale Street to Oblivion' are welcomed with open arms by the crowd, as are older classics such as the aptly named 'The Mob Goes Wild'. Funk fuelled numbers such as 'Electric Worry' really display these lads versatility, with the chorus of "bang bang bang bang, vamanos vamanos" echoing throughout the chanting crowd.
There is little time for small talk and pleasantries, with guitarist Tim Sult flying into track after track with little respite. It is songs from the band's 2006 release 'Exodus' that get the most emphatic responses of the evening, such as the raucous ‘The Incomporarble Mr. Flannery', and the fantastic 'Burning Beard', a song with a time signature designed only to confuse and impress any one trying to dance along. The band pay homage to their love of Beale Street/Memphis blues by inviting out a huge lumbering hamonica player, who blasts his harp with the fury of Kerry King blasting his axe at full pelt. It's all wrapped up by the very respectable time of 10.15pm, coz of the strict Easter curfew enforced by God or something, but nothing about this gig has been sedate - totally deafening, and totally rocking.
