Voices
DIAMAT
THE BLACK HEART, LONDON
LONDON MISCREANTS WEAVE A TURBULENT NEW SPELL
VOICES’ MISSION HAS
always been an emotional and psychological one. Extreme metal might have been the first tools they had to hand, but the huge leaps between each album has been a case of reevaluating form to find its most resonant pitch, finding something more fertile beneath the black and death casing. Tonight is the launch for their third album, Frightened, and support act DIAMAT [7] are an apt, frequency-jamming choice. Power electronics can be overly po-faced or a desperate attempt to sound edgy, but the glee written across mainman Saint Max’s smirk and from behind the tinted glasses is the mark of someone who knows how to twist the knife. “We love black metal, with its barely concealed Nazism and child porn scandals,” he barks as Killing Joke samples are mangled amid gratuitously heavy grooves and white noise whipped up into a delirious froth as the duo yoke the audience into their melée. The packed, committed crowd tonight are a sign that VOICES [8] are becoming a cause célèbre, a band marking out new and necessary, cathartic territory. If the PA isn’t initially a match for their mournfully turbulent dynamics, Unknown’s glistening surges and Evaporated’s post-punk lurch lacking the space to breathe, there’s a bond between band and crowd that raises the atmosphere to the level of communion. Petrograph fuses Virus and Killing Joke to staggering effect, frontman Peter Benjamin embodies the wracked, rapt nature of the band’s new sound, and if tonight marks a departure, it’s also the arrival of something magical.
JONATHAN SELZER