Electric Taurus – Stiff Kitten, Belfast 29/03/2014

With some inane pop band booked into play it’s spiritual home, this week’s RocKD promotion was forced once again to move across the street (and around the corner, past the car park…) to the surprisingly hospitable (despite the lack of both/either Guinness or Magners on draft) surroundings of the venue with the singular most pornographic name in the business…

Electric Taurus Stiff Kitten gig posterOpeners Nomadic Rituals (https://www.facebook.com/NomadicRituals) deliver a minimalistic sound so heavily downtuned it makes the hairs on your toes curl:  their darkly cacophonous soundscapes, built on downbeat, droning instrumental passages interjected with briefly effective vocal ejaculations, portray forbidding, almost cinematic imagery.

Ironically, in the time gap between this gig and this copy being filed, Tusks (https://www.facebook.com/TUSKStheband) parted company with vocalist Tom Clarke, with both parties citing the singer’s ongoing vocal problems.  Before the gig, Tom had openly admitted to your humble reviewer that his voice was in trouble, but this did not stop the dude getting up and giving it his all, as the quartet ground their way through their set of dark but melodic doom, delivered with a hard ‘n’ heavy groove built on a surprising harmonic density.  Tom’s vocal problems lead them to finish their set with a rough and raw but strangely enervating instrumental.

Classic doom trio Electric Taurus have travelled north of the border for the second time in less than a year to deliver a stripped down and basic, no frills sound that draws as heavily in the underground psychedelic movement of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s as it is in its more latter day desert-dwelling counterparts.  And, indeed, the hairs on your leg rise as the trio launch into their immersive set – it’s fuzzed out, detuned psychedelic mayhem quickly making you regret that its both only 8:30 at night and the bar doesn’t serve bourbon.

A trio of stunning musicians, who have spent a considerable amount of time crafting and perfecting their sound, this is a band who manage to interject jazz interludes into the darkest of melodies and convert the most heathen of headbanging metallians into louche lounge lizards with their constant mood swings.  The result is the sort of soporific but awakening and immersive music you luxuriate in.

https://www.facebook.com/electrictaurus

 

About Mark Ashby

no longer planetmosh staff