It’s a Friday night, the 4th of July, and downtown Montreal is hopping. Once you find your way to the upstairs section of legendary metal venue Piranha Bar (not easy, actually, if you don’t know where you’re going), you are met with a sparsely attended, cavernous room for Spiritual Poison’s set.
A one-man noise/ambient project from Denver, Colorado, Spiritual Poison’s music is gloomy and ominous, mixing feedback and haunting crescendos, and provides a welcome trip into familiar yet potent industrial noise territories. I always feel this is a very visual musical genre, and Spiritual Poison indeed conjures up visions of apocalyptic wastelands and danger zones.
The heavy metal track that pipes up over the PA immediately at the end of the set is a bit incongruous, though, and by the time Today Is The Day start soundchecking (a bit annoyingly, to be honest), the room still feels quite empty.
Cut down to a two-piece these days, with drummer Colin Frecknall accompanying Steve Austin on vocals/guitars/samples, the long-standing noise rock act is nonetheless loud as fuck. As they plow through one skronky, pummelling onslaught after the next, all enriched by Austin’s pain-fuelled howls, they clearly make a hell of a racket for just two people.
“You can come up if you want to, I won’t bite you,” says Austin to the audience, which dutifully approaches the stage, and finally begins to fill out during their set. TITD have an immense back catalogue from which to pick and choose, and it’s great to witness the power of noise rock in person, from a time when bands like Today Is The Day, Zeni Geva, Cows, and labels like Amphetamine Reptile and Touch & Go were redefining what heavy music could be – this before the nu-metal crowd packaged it for a pop audience and took over the mainstream.
Steve Austin is a legend for good reason, and though older and greyer, he still has the juice. “I think it’s time for ‘Animal Mother,’ dial one up for me bro,” he says to Frecknall, and the pounding drums commence.
Another legend is up next: Lydia Lunch! Writer, performer, and shocker extraordinaire, tonight fronting Murderous Again – a trio rounded out by bassist/vocalist Tim Dahl (also in Child Abuse) and drummer Kevin Shea (God Is My Co-Pilot).
“We’re going to take it down from what you heard before: ease you into it a little bit,” says Lunch, but their set is nonetheless noisy as hell, consisting of spoken-word monologues by Lunch interspersed with noise rock jams by the other two. In the best Beat tradition, Lunch rants and raves, offering up tortured and paranoid yet funny and insightful shards of wisdom and terror: “I am a pathological truth teller surrounded by pathological liars”; “Freedom is a fucking hallucination: don’t film this show, this is fucking real”; “God was the first cop, the first cock”; “Right now it is time for women to rise up.”
Lunch certainly has a way with words, and her performance is inspired by genuine anger at the state of the world, and closer “Ghosts” (“You better believe in ghosts because soon you will become one… all the ghosts America has made fighting for fucking bullshit”) is mesmerising and profound. We need more of this energy in our lives right now.
Third legend up! Singer/martial artist/raconteur and writer Eugene Robinson, whose long-running noise-art-rock band Oxbow recently (and abruptly) came to an end, but who has jumped back into the fray quite quickly with Buñuel, rounded out by guitarist Xabier Iriondo (Afterhours), bassist David Haemery (Sordide), and drummer Frank Valente (Il Teatro Degli Orrori).
Dressed in black leather, and sporting what looks like black tape over his ears, Robinson is a magnetic presence onstage, and there is great chemistry between him and his more youthful backing band. Buñuel’s music is, I would say, slightly more direct and less arty than Oxbow, its loose yet noisy grooves reminding me a little of The Jesus Lizard or Tomahawk, alternating between heavy rock workouts and more meditative, nocturnal vibes recalling long, surreal nights out.
The band is named after Spanish film director Luis Buñuel, who you may know from that famous eyeball-slicing scene in Un Chien Andalou, and the music certainly fits the name. “I haven’t played Montreal since they walked me through the airport in cuffs,” says Robinson between songs. “Good old Canadian hospitality: you haven’t lived until you’ve been walked through an airport in cuffs.”
All in all, a great night out: satisfying and thought-provoking, and a reminder of the power of noise in art to disrupt and reshape the world in the face of all that cruelty and disaster we are currently living through.
Review – Daniel Lukes
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