THE BODY/FULL OF HELL
PETBRICK/THRESHOLD ENTITIES
THE DOME, LONDON
Hellish noisemongers join forces to exhilarating effect
IT SEEMS LUDICROUS that this double-handed headfuck can sell out the hangar-like Dome, but welcome to the wonderful world of heavy metal in 2019: utterly fearless, and ever-hungry for fresh new horrors. After some early experimentation from THRESHOLD ENTITIES and PETBRICK it’s into the true meat of the night’s ordeal as THE BODY quietly take the stage. Though singer/guitarist Chip King stands a foot back from his mic at all times, his ungodly shriek still cuts the humid air like a scythe, while drummer Lee Buford’s piston-like performance provides the focal point for the band’s whole set. Beyond the brief addition of FULL OF HELL’S Samuel Di Gristine on sax, the band’s performance is thoroughly inward-focused, but just as it threatens to descend into mush something strange happens – meaninglessness becomes meaning, and the band’s hypnotic hate-sludge takes on a mesmeric quality like the hot thrum of blood in your veins. FULL OF HELL, by contrast, are crisp and dynamic as they surge through the likes of Silmaril and Thundering Hammers. Frontman Dylan Walker is a chiropractor’s wet dream, cracking and contorting as he haemorrhages vitriol and goads the somewhat polite crowd into activity: “This is a new one,” he says drily at one point. “It’s about jumping off a stage.” Gradually the audience takes the bait and grows bolder, with a series of bodies tumbling like an avalanche loosed by the band’s noise-assisted grind eruptions. Things close out with the two bands coagulating to form a six-headed hell-presence, sloughing off large chunks of their own individuality to forge a whole new language. At its peak the industrialised assault seems to send a pained undulation through the crowd like an inverted, stomachcramping Mexican wave, all while those standing shoulder to shoulder onstage appear, bizarrely, to be having the time of their lives.