Capricorns

Ringin’ stingin’ ears cooled by the first freezing winds of winter, legs traversing an out-of-commission crossing as motorcycles slice personal space like butchers knives through warmed feta, neck cramped and knees sore from perpetual rocking back and forth, back and forth, rhythmically consistent and unfaltering: this is me shortly after the climax of Torche’s first-ever London performance, stumbling from venue to Underground, dazzled by Camden’s takeaway lights and drug-offloading stand-arounds._ Yeee-ouch_, that was some set.

The Florida-spawned quartet – sandwiched tonight ‘tween local standard-bearers of face-fucking brutality Capricorns and Savannah-based tech-metallers Baroness, both of whom deliver quality sets – set the fingers and thumbs, wrists and forearms of all and sundry before them into an air-guitar frenzy. Primarily instrumental of execution, these songs rattle the inside of skulls and battle grey matter into submission; they roar and jerk and slide and glide and crush mountains into sawdust and splinter glaciers like those rulers in school that apparently wouldn’t shatter if you thwacked them with all your might (lie).

Steve Brookes is worth the admission fee alone (okay, so I didn’t pay – it’s rhetorical). The band’s singer/guitarist – outshone in the six-string aerobics stakes by the man to his right, the ridiculously-long-haired and fantastically named Juan Montoya – sports some quite excellently hypnotic top-lip furniture, his moustache blinking in and out of focus as he steps up to and away from the microphone. He growls like a starved attack dog, yet smiles like a kid let loose in a toy store with fat-cat daddy’s credit cards; in fact, every member of the band looks like he could look after himself in a brawl, yet exudes the sort of look-at-me showmanship best associated with less-than-manly types. Think Freddie Mercury, shorn of mic’ stand, with a shocking Halloween wig atop his head and an electrified axe in his hands: that’s Montoya, right there.

‘Thunder pop’ is what their domestic label, Rock Action, has called Torche; from this display of accomplished musicianship colliding with riffs of immediacy and head-nodding addictiveness, it’s easy to understand the ‘pop’ reference. Disposable, though, these songs are not: coming on like Mastodon playing at being The Fucking Champs for an afternoon, Torche are the discerning metalhead’s newfound party-time buddies, sure to get a drinking session started and certain to provide a thunderous climax to head-in-the-bowl conclusions.