DEAFHEAVEN TOUCHÉ AMORÉ/PORTRAYAL OF GUILT
ELECTRIC BALLROOM, LONDON
Disparate scene leaders bring each other to the boil
ON Paper, there’s not much in common between the misanthropic blackgaze of Deafheaven and the heart-on-sleeve hardcore punk of Touché Amoré, but such diversity is what makes this bill such a treat. Avant-garde extremists Portrayal Of GUILT provide an utterly terrifying aperitif of blackened hardcore noise terror. If the Texans are able to show this much promise after just two years as a band, it’s terrifying to think how potent they could be given a few more years.
The reaction to TOUCHÉ AMORÉ is instantaneous as frontman Jeremy Bolm leads the crowd in a frenzied rendition of And Now It’s Happening In Mine. If the backdrop displaying artwork for …To The Beat Of A Dead Horse isn’t a giveaway, it soon becomes clear that we’re being treated to a full airing of their 2009 debut album, an 11-track, 18-minute rush of melodic hardcore that’s barely dated at all in the intervening 10 years. A swirling mass of bodies bounce off one another like molecules being heated to boiling point. The response ratchets up even further once the band begin a second set of 12 songs plucked from their remaining three albums. Amends and
Flowers And You receive rapturous singalongs, whilst Skyscraper is a towering tour de force.
The crowd’s energy doesn’t dip one iota for Deafheaven’s performance, as they sing every note of Honeycomb’s anthemic guitar solo. It’s a scene more often associated with an Iron Maiden show than a Deafheaven one, but the material from latest album
Ordinary Corrupt Human Love lends itself to rousing instrumental singalongs. Touring alongside Touché Amoré seems to have lent the quintet a considerable sense of urgency, with the tracks played at a much faster tempo than their recorded counterparts. Standalone single Black Brick sounds utterly ferocious, acting as a defiant middle finger to the knuckle-dragging trve cvlt fans that dismiss Deafheaven as a sub-standard dilution of black metal ideals served up in pink packaging. Thank Satan they rise above such criticisms, otherwise they might have never written anything as sublime as the celestial Worthless Animal, which sounds like The Cure having been raised on Darkthrone rather than Pink Floyd. Tonight proves that bands can push one another to previously unreached heights when mutually encouraged to do so, a gratifying thought that disperses itself across the entire evening like a cloud of euphoria. REMFRY DEDMAN