Headquarters

Charlottefield make their guitars scream in protest. Their vocalist screams too; a hoarse, vitriolic chest constricting shriek which wants to cut up your ears you fuck. Their music revives DC Hardcore, hooks its pristine corpse up to a defibrillator and jerks in tandem with the ensuing smouldering spastic mess.

They have this one song that they close with that restores my faith in guitars. It is a splintering, crashing zeppelin of a track which burns gloriously for however many minutes it takes to descend and as it gets closer the sounds of metal tearing gets greater until the band stop playing and the discarded bass hums tone until the lights go down.

Noize Reversion use guitars too, but to entirely different ends. Over twenty-five minutes of warped maybe-techno, motifs shift and mutate; ambient plucked strings hovering over looped bass throb fades into pounding dub. Their set can’t quite sustain its length, eventually sliding into pulsing repetition, but the first half is nevertheless a dirty, vibrant exploration of the fringes of electronica.

Ambling back into the indie-rock arrangement that bonds the rest of the bands on the bill, Planquez bear more than a passing resemblance to Shellac; another three-piece dealing in bursts of vaguely off-the-wall spoken word and the droning, simmering riffs which casually promise, and inevitably deliver, the gradual build and grinding climaxes that this format provides so well. Despite being definitively unoriginal, this is fine, enjoyable rock music.

Headquarters are not like Planquez. Their songs are short, simple. Not angular, or barbed, or serrated. My buzz words don’t quite work. Their songs, rather, are repeated, twisted stab wounds and as such, certainly demands attention. Unfortunately it isn’t particularly subtle or varied, relying on a propulsive, leering rhythm section (including a disappointingly anonymous keyboard); the high pitched sting of guitar; bursts of barked vocal, and very little else.

They are, then, a menacing, streamlined distillation of every band to play this night before them, but they lack the fast-forward explosiveness of Charlottefield or the fleetingly brilliant mutations of Noize Reversion. Simplicity of form can be a wonderful thing – but it can also be monotone. In half an hour, Headquarters creep dangerously close to the latter.