(((O))) Live: Zu • Taupe – Nice N Sleazy, Glasgow

The world is on fire but as usual, it’s another damp and dreary Monday night in Glasgow. While most of the city has wisely decided to stay home, a surprisingly sizeable number have decided to congregate in Nice n Sleazy’s basement to witness the return of the almighty Zu, which is arguably an even wiser decision. After all, how often do you get this chance?

The duty of warming up the room lands on local trio Taupe who have evidently taken a cue or five from tonight’s headliners (sax player Jamie Stockbridge notes at one point that at every gig they played, someone would inevitably approach them and ask, “Have you heard of this band from Italy called Zu? I think you’d really like them.”) Thankfully they’re no mere tribute act but a completely unique chimera that fuses jazz, math-rock and a metal-adjacent racket to make music that is skittish, beautiful and supremely heavy.

Short, sharp stabs of saxophone and snare signal the start of ‘Lemonade Tycoon’, a rollicking good time that jerks and rolls with increasing disregard for timing and regularity, but behind the non-Euclidean madness there’s a solid groove at work, insisting that the head weave in time with Alex Palmer’s tight drumwork and the dancing fingers of Mike Parr-Burman. It’s the latter’s contributions, all frantic fretwork, that keeps the music anchored within something of a math-rock framework (though his neck-wrangling freakout during ‘Pet Boss’ does veer wildly into the genre’s outer reaches). Between this, Palmer’s caveman heft and spritely exuberance, and sheer technical brilliance of Stockbridge, Taupe are a delightful surprise and will hopefully be gracing many more bills in the near future.

 

Despite the well-meaning suggestions of Taupe’s former attendees, Zu are a band who need no introduction. They are titans striding across a world of their own making, a collision of doom, jazz, prog and hardcore that feels massive enough to have wiped out the dinosaurs, and in new album Ferrum Sidereum (a title that aptly enough translates as cosmic iron) they somehow surpassed themselves and gotten even heavier. On record, that’s impressive; in the flesh, it’s like watching a natural disaster unfold, a juggernaut of sound and riffs that simply obliterates everything in its path.

An obvious asset is Luca T. Mai, his synths bringing so much tone, richness and complexity to the band’s sound. His layers of cosmic static and stabs of giallo melodrama turn these songs into something devotional, but when he adopts his baritone sax persona the sound is utterly primal, a cavernous bellow that churns the gut. Of course, there’s more to him than just Stygian bellows, his runs during a mammoth run-through of ‘A.I. Hive Mind’ piercing and unerringly on-point, yet he remains intensely focused throughout their lengthy set, a useful trait given the myriad twists and turns that occur in any given song.

As if Mai didn’t already bring enough low-end courtesy of his impressive lung capacity, Massimo Pupillo more than doubles the sonic weight on offer. His work on ‘La Donna Vestita di Sole’ sounds colossal, a harsh metallic assault that sinks into a more muted but dextrous display before it all comes crashing right back down on the audience’s heads, leaving bodies jerking in time with each awkward, lurching wave of cosmic doom.

 

As the most recent inclusion to the group, Paulo Mongardi was already the odd man out but as he throws himself into the fray whenever his comrades up the tempo, it feels like he would never be the kind of drummer to settle neatly into the background. There’s a wildness to his playing, a full-body level of commitment that turns timing and technique into something innate. His swings on ‘Fuoco Saturnio’ seem chaotic but prove an expert match for the music’s bursts of lurching excess and serpentine nature, while ‘Perseidi’ focuses more on raw power, his strikes direct and purposeful.

Given the considerable length of Ferrum Sidereum, a full run-through was never going to be an easy undertaking yet the material has a strange, otherworldly quality that seems to draw the room into the same headspace as Zu themselves. It’s a sprawling, hypnotic labyrinth of sound and getting lost in it almost seems to be the point, an overwhelming barrage of jazz-doom-hardcore excess too out there to even try to comprehend; instead, the audience are content to just come along for the ride and see where it takes them. In other words, this was a trip; and even if no-one has any idea where the hell they went, the smiles and praise that stay after the band have left the stage say they were happy to go.