Bonemachine

The idea of guitar bands creating music that goes from ‘lilting’ to ‘relentless’ to ‘a magnificent bloody racket’ seems a popular idea, but with few names to actually play with. From now, though, Brenda can be added to that small list. The vocals sit somewhere between the high-pitched-ness of Tim Buckley and the melancholic tones of The Coral’s James Skelley, with something unpleasantly sticky crawling up the singer’s leg on occasions. The drummer starts attacking a wall of cymbals, and the rest of the band try and work out what those shiny buttons on the amplifiers do, thus creating an exhilarating wall of white noise, like My Bloody Valentine chewing concrete or Godspeed You! Black Emperor at their most skull-crackingly unsubtle, having just raided the machine cupboard. Ace.

The start of Dilutral’s set is not too promising, with a rather dour sound: it suggests a desire to be Tool but ends up more like a terminally-depressed Lostprophets. But then, just as you’re about to assume that you’re in for an insipid and uninspiring half hour comprising third-rate imitations of every metal band that’s eaten up America during the last decade, the guitarist brings out the secret weapon: a trombone. Yes, one of the bearded, dreadlocked guys kitted out in jet black is PLAYING. A. TROMBONE. Which automatically increases our estimation of them several-hundred fold. Yes, there are better bands about. Sure, you could just go out and buy a decent Nine Inch Nails record. But it’s because of their occasional flourishes into industrial beats and unashamed dabbling in brass instruments that makes them worth checking out. Catch ‘em while you can.

Much more experimental, though, are Bonemachine, who start with an announcement: “An hour of ambient jazz, then”. Out blasts high-pitched vocal samples and snippets of George Bush rhetoric, with the drummerless group sprawling loudly like Suicide slapping Boards of Canada about the face with a bag of wet politics. There’s more yearning vocals over drone-prone dance rock, with the guitar getting louder, the bass getting more intense and the beats becoming more pounding for a “Lullaby [about] a guy who met another guy on the internet and then ate his cock”. It also seems that the further on in the set the group gets the more ‘song-based’ they become, with closing track Love Is even having a riff and a verse-chorus-verse structure and everything. Jazz? Well, it’s a broad term, so perhaps. Ambient? Only if you’re a bit disturbed. Whatever it is, it’s bloody marvellous.