Liverpool Music Week 2014: Hookworms, Mind Mountain, Cavalier Song: The Kazimier, Liverpool

Hookworms head up a ferocious affair in Liverpool, Getintothis’ Mark Greenwood reports on his worst modernist nightmare – and it’s positively dreamy.

It’s an unusually warm night scurrying down from the Roscoe Head fuelled on some over hoppy Cheshire Ale.

Getintothis seek to attain a level of immediacy and realism despite a line-up of prog-singed psychedelic. After a week of drone-entrenched antics we’re eager to explore the more esoteric tropes of a Liverpool alt-psych domain.

Cue Cavalier Song, a kind of punk-stained King Crimson full of irregular time signatures, discordant harmonies and pentatonic stretching.

Cavalier Song create a distinct buzz in the Kazimier, their dark and dynamic requiems exploring notions of the chaotic and grotesque. Cracked cymbals and visible effects add a post-Brechtian performance dimension where odd-chords are dichotomised with minimal rhythmic treatments and sparse movements.

Creepy and obdurate, spoken un-languages sync with loops of uncertainty and modern dystopian rhetoric.

Mind Mountain are relentless as ever, coasting through dark cosmic plains, keyboard scapes and hard guitars.

Sabbath meets Hawkwind in a Crimson melt with enough reserve to kick on through mellow lapses to heavy drone obliteration.

The trio hum like multi-stellar space machine and Joe Hiron’s guitar playing is enough to drool over in quasi-schizoid paralysis. Accomplished, virtuosic and solid, they immerse themselves in dark rituals tinged with trad-prog.

Hirons offers extended Zappa-esque solos that carry a narrative of intra-stellar sex and space cowboy charisma in a dystopian oasis of Pan-American psyche burn out.

Hookworms have a hooligan quality tonight.

The sound is driving and vocals empowering with appropriate cosmic visuals. Sonic palimpsests reveal hard psych underpinned by a hard-core-punk ethos.

The band materialise as repetition in pure essence, mechanical and machine-like with shades of post-humanism embroiled in a disembodied voice that storms crosses the Pennines.

The band induces a spectacular psychosis as melodies collide in clusters of analogue drone and excited bass-lines suspended in glitch architecture of our worst modernist nightmares. Each number revels in a kind of post-industrial jouissance, a series of cum-shots strewn across a Kazimier crowd transfixed by analogue and sonic distortion. We fucking love this band who appear to merge the hypnotic self-awareness with energetic hyper-activity and street-wise credulity.

What else is there to say in retrospect to a fine line-up of bands that each threaten to ionise psych, heavy, punk/hard-core crossovers? Perhaps the urge to dig deeper and meditate on such a line-up of bands is contradictory to a live music form that reviles in audience consumption and un-cool affective response?

Pictures Getintothis‘ Martin Waters.

Comments

comments