Scratch an industrial fan and you might occasionally find a metalhead. Or just an industrial fan who is getting very annoyed and wants to know why you keep scratching them.
Regular readers might have got a hint of n0teeth's metallic leanings from previous posts. Full disclosure: we never really "grew out of" metal, we just happened to discover industrial at an impressionable age, and one which happened to coincide with Kerrang! and Metal Hammer deciding to focus on emo-tinged hair metal slop like Bullet For My Valentine to the exclusion of anything with a real bite to it.
Our first gig was Sepultura opening for Motörhead. If there is a better introduction to metal music than Derrick Green vomiting shredded lung tissue to Roots Bloody Roots shortly before Lemmy & co come along and blast a ♠️-shaped hole in your skull, I have yet to hear of it. Pity poor long-suffering Papa Teeth who accompanied us to the gig (as anyone under 16 was required to be) and sat through several hours of high-decibel Marshall stack abuse.
On Monday night we went back to our roots (bloody roots), attending a gig by human drum machine / Sepultura founder & percussionist Iggor Cavalera, and his current project, Petbrick. We have watched with keen interest the younger Cavalera brother's expansion into electronic music ever since Mixhell stomped and bleeped its way across our radar, but Petbrick takes everything to much noisier, heavier extremes, marrying Iggor's crushing percussive might to an array of uncategorisable electronic noises courtesy of London noise rock scene luminary Wayne Adams. And tonight they were bringing this unholy racket to n0teeth's favourite dive, our home away from home, the inimitable Corsica Studios.
(n0teeth style guidelines: always spell Iggor's name with two Gs as that is how he spells it himself on his Instagram)
In true n0teeth fashion, we missed opening act Trepaneringsritualen by popping into one of Elephant & Castle's many top-tier Colombian cafes for "a light snack" which soon became a full dinner. (Nevermind. We shall conduct our own private trepanning ritual another time to make up for it.)
We pitched up at Corsica's main room just in time for the opening rolling, sub-bass frequencies of Petbrick to kick in. Finding a comfortable spot right in front of a speaker stack, the soundwaves knocked my hat off within five seconds. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the sheer power of a Funktion One can certainly hurry the digestive process along, even in the absence of any after-dinner stimulants.
The Brick's sound is impossible to categorise as anything other than Extremely Fucking Heavy Music. It's not metal, it's not industrial, it's not acid techno - it's a bit of all of these, peppered with bursts of harsh noise and underpinned by Iggor's breathtakingly brutal yet disciplined d-beat inspired drumming.
There is a special kind of dissonance you get when a massive percussive attack collides with electronic skronk. Absent any kind of organic warmth that a guitar or bass might provide, you're left with a steely, mechanistic throb that hits differently depending on whose hands it's in. But whether being pummelled into submission by Petbrick, willingly submitting to Factory Floor's rather less abrasive take on the format, or taking Ninos du Brasil's full-knacker industrial samba assault straight to the temple, n0teeth remains a firm fan of live drums in electronic music.
Except when it's a bunch of hippies bongoing along to psytrance. There's simply no need for any of that.
