By: Chad Murray
Gnod | website | bandcamp |
Support: Barberos | website
I’ve spent the past week more or less in isolation slaving away for the biggest test of my life. The anxiety boils inside my skin like sulphuric acid eating away at me; just going the shop fills me with disdain for the recklessly ego-centric and inconsiderate moral abandon of society. Guys who go out to get “pussy”, classrooms full of students who don’t wanna learn and can’t be taught. Small units of people, fucking people, alienating each other.
Bigoted, divided, gentrified people. I take the bus and some sort of intoxicated reprobate attempts to sneak on behind, the bus sound some sort of distress signal; this guy is too fucked up and poor to take the bus so, the driver blasts a siren until the guy fucked off. A sign of the times, look at the increase in rough sleepers and mental health issues since Cameron and Jeremy (C)Hunt began their siege on the ethics of the UK. When I finally sit down, there’s a group of girls yelling abuse at passengers on the top deck, they begin to run back and forth and draw the ire of seemingly everyone onboard. I can’t fucking wait to get out of here, I can’t wait to escape to the land of Gnod.
The Buyer’s Club gig is seemingly a secret affair for die-hard fans and the beneficiaries of serendipity. I got lucky and checked my e-mails one day to find that my lecturer, Keith Marley, had stumbled on the gig and knowing that I hold the belief that Rocket Recordings is the best record label in the world and that Gnod’s The Mirror is one of the seminal albums of our time, he’s kind enough to clue me in. The anticipation before the gig is palpable, the isolated, infuriated microcosm of society awaiting the band is united in admiration and suspense. This sub-rosa affair becomes almost intimate, whilst slightly puzzling. Why is there not people lining up to see Gnod? Why is this gnarly reflection of the desolation of the United Kingdom not being viewed by a greater mass? This is the city where 30,000 people just sang ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ in memoriam of the 96 who lost their lives at Hillsborough and were slandered by The Sun newspaper, David Cameron and Boris Johnston, none of whom had the fucking guts to make a worthy apology. This is the city that has just exposed justice and truth in the face of overwhelming corruption, manipulation and outright bullshit. When you have a man who scorns football fans for being uncouth as prime minister, when years prior he’d fucked a dead pig’s face where does that leave us? Where is the anger? Where is the fucking rage?
Here it is.
Right in The Buyer’s club.
The spirit of punk is resurrected, Gnod are holding the mirror up to society and telling you to take a look at the fucking state where in. Look at the shear unwavering hatred and enmity in the media. Look at the scare tactics the conservatives are using. Look at the ineffectual divided Labour party who no one can get behind because they refuse to expose the opposition as an old boy’s club so disassociated from society that they’d probably resonate better with the residents of a fucking reptile house. We are in a divided nation because it benefits the bastards pulling the strings who wanna pit us against each other and feast on the carcass, reaping the benefits of our divisions by trying to make themselves a lesser evil. Ignorance is not bliss, ignorance would be our downfall.
Art is bliss, freedom is bliss. And it’s only in our freedom of expression and the continued exposure of corruption and controversy by the people who pull the strings that we see that we’re all being fucked over and the only thing we can do is choose to opt out and make a change. Fugazi said it best: never mind what’s been selling, it’s what you’re buying.
For just SEVEN FUCKING POUNDS, I just got to see one of the greatest gigs I’ve ever been to in my life. I finally felt vindicated in the vitriol that has been increasingly sweltering over me. The ineffable, inexpressible power of the music I witnessed tonight made me realise, I am not insane. I’ve simply escaped the fucking matrix (and no, I’ve not been persecuted by the scouse mariah force yet) and found a connection to the real world. Thank fuck for Echoes and Dust, Keith Marley and Jake Murray for opening my eyes and letting Rocket Recordings and Gnod pour in. Finally, I felt a release that NOTHING else has provided for me from the crippling weight of scarcely expressible disillusionment I’ve felt with society.
There are no pipe dreams, there is no wishful thinking, there are only ideas and aspirations and whilst some of us leave them to simmer until they evaporate; at the Buyer’s Club, Gnod and Barberos realise an ideological geyser of sublime unadulterated societal exposure.
I walk into the room to see what appears to be three bank-robbing gimps trying out balaclavas. Perhaps its apt that like Gnod, these three artists reflect society as the physical incarnation of the ruination of capitalism; mirroring the banks who steal from us every day and fuck us relentlessly until there’s nothing but bitterness left in our swollen little collective coin purse. However, this act inherently displays one of the greatest rhetorical gifts of mankind; satire. You either laugh or cry.
“Come closer” – beckons one of the drummer/vocalists, there is no division here. I stand at arm’s length from three stupefying artists, two drum kits and a synthesiser and can’t help but, smile at how surreal the band is. I don’t remember hearing Barberos before tonight but, fuck me, are they incredible. It’s not just the oscillating rhythms or the neurological sonic mastery of chaos on the keys, it’s the nuance, it’s the performance. It’s little things like the drummer maintaining eye contact with me and other fans whilst singing in a high pitched voice until I can’t help but laugh out loud. In that moment, life is great, nothing matters. It’s the mirror image of the two drummers holding their sticks in the end with such Python-esque oddball hilarity, doing so little and providing so much entertainment. It’s the moment when they deliberately tinker with things as though they’re not going to plan like the scene in The Dark Knight when The Joker’s detonator does not initially go off as planned and so Heath Ledger fumbles around insanely until he hears a boom. It feels as though, the band have assimilated into one spiritual triumvirate playing complex noisy, krautrock tinged, noise-soaked math rock whilst also providing a comedic performance so, theatrical that the performance almost becomes nihilistic. One minute you’re blasted with a thousand tonnes of stunning aural madness, and the next you’re laughing your ass off. By the end, I questioned every movement the band made: whether it was planned, whether it was supposed to be funny or whether I could trust the presuppositions I initially approached their performance with. When the last song finally arrived in their set, the band exploded a Health-esque bark of electronic music before one of the drummer/singers proclaimed “merci”. By this point, I knew the fun wasn’t over, I had set aside my presumptions and felt as though I was in on something. What came next was an astounding climax to a tremendous opening act.
Gnod take the stage. What erupts into the Buyer’s Club is nothing short of a anthropomorphised brutalist tower exploded onto the audience. The products of several generations of failed political leadership; a disillusioned, unrelenting, undeceivable product of the fucked up, segregated society we’re living in. A primal roar of dissatisfaction and a mastery of unadulterated, uncut, expression. Pure artistry exhibited with a masterful expertise in every fibre of its musicality. A sound so bold and monolithic that it takes over the entire building and yet, each contributing factor is given its room to breathe. The thunderous bass bellows out a thousand fathoms of oceanic power onto the audience. The guitars are shredded into decimated blades of confettied sublimity. Samples and effects churn out alternate dimensions of atmosphere creating an almost tangible texture to every song as they seamlessly transition together. Two drummers violently vent the collective roar of humanity into one percussive sparring session. Each guitar tone, each nuance considered and presented as a perfect encapsulation of the raw power of the band. But, the primeval, guttural, battle-cry that drove the performance was undoubtably the human element; the vocals.
Keith felt as though he was witnessing Iggy and The Stooges, I have to say, as an obsessive Joy Division fan, (yeah, the ultra rarity searching, multiple versions of Ceremony, deep lyric analysing, Ian Curtis idolising type. Joy Division was after all, one of the first bands that I really felt understood how I experienced the world), I felt as though, I had lived out a dream and experienced what it would be like to witness a Joy Division live performance. One simple word screamed until its meaning became as clear as its seethingly unsolvable inspiration; people.
Other people make life worth living and other people make life almost insufferable. Why do we project such pain and apathy on each other when we’re capable of such love and such creativity? There is no answer, there is only respite and nepenthe. Vice and virtue. You can sink down in it and let it swallow you whole and cave into depression and anxiety and stress, you can get lost in the rat race and the bullshit mainstream media or you can exorcise that suppressed voice inside of you that like Howard Beale says “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this anymore”. If you don’t believe me, try not listening to Gnod when they’re playing; it’s pretty much impossible, it enraptures every living molecule of your being.
They talk about that legendary Sex Pistols gig in 1976, where a bunch of pissed off Mancunians congregated for a show that revolutionised music, inspiring some of the greatest bands to ever come out of the city and laying the foundation for Factory Records one of the greatest labels of all time. What better parallel has there ever been for these two collectives?
Gnod are seemingly the perfect band for our time, capturing the zeitgest and taking no prisoners, that is how it’s fucking done. An absolutely essential collective as with many of Rocket’s bands; providing one of the last bastions of consistently excellent, consistently on-point artistry. It’s time to get pissed off, it’s time to enact a fucking change.
“. . . And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They’re quite aware of what they’re going through.”
David Bowie, ‘Changes’
