- A Constructive Critisism of Jesus
and Other Brave Sunday Musings -
feat. BIG BRAVE, DEAFKIDS, DUMA, ELIZABETH COLOUR WHEEL & ETHAN LE MCCARTHY, IMPERIAL TRIUMPHANT, MAT BALL and ZOLA JESUS
Finally a day which began with some tourist weather!
That would have been a good opportunity to grab a film camera and visit one or two interesting spots - if only I had a little more time and knew a destination. But since I hadn't scouted around the area of Sprang-Capelle north of Tilburg before, I just left it at a small walk through the immediate neighbourhood with my Digital Harinezumi 3.0 toy camera.
If you're new to my reports - that thing is also what I shoot most of my live photos with (only the square ones in my Roadburn reviews are smartphone pictures), so that explains the "weird" look. Just in case you've been wondering about that.
Back in Tilburg only four official stages were being played today, as Paradox and The Engine Room had already been retired for this year last night. And after a small unhealthy lunch I found myself in front of one of them - The Terminal - for the last time.
It had always been the plan anyway, but after missing the first Elizabeth Colour Wheel show on Friday and the absolute revelation that was singer Shane Li's solo performance as Otay:onii it was completely out of question that I would watch their commissioned project with Ethan Lee McCarthy from Primitive Man.
Fuck, this shit was good! Ridiculously heavy when it wanted to be, over the top dramatic (what a mad performance by ECW's guitar player!), but also dynamic, filigreed and artistic. The singer, who also brought her droning keytar again, absolutely crushed it. If you're looking for the central personalities of Roadburn 2023, she's most definitely among them.
My sole problem with this show was its length - which realistically was absolutely ok. We still wanted more though. Killer! Please bring this back as a "Live at Roadburn" release!
No beating about the bush here: Surprisingly this was the biggest dissappointment of the festival.
Imperial Triumphant's
2019 "Vile Luxury" show - the very last music performance in
Het Patronaat - had been legendary. Their latest work
"Spirit of Ecstasy" has only been beat by
Voivod in my latest
album of the year ranking, and their last
show in Hamburg, already with several new songs on the setlist, had been a brainfucking blast, too.
So all the signs for the trio's relentless Avantgarde Jazz take on Black Metal were indicating a spectacle. But whoever was responsible for the sound either didn't understand the FOH system or the music. Especially since the first band on the
Main Stage should have time for a proper check it's beyond me how this happened.
Imperial Triumphant just isn't supposed to sound like a flat Death Metal drum solo on the
Wacken Open Air with some accompanying gutturals. The only instances of this mess sounding like music was when the guest trombonist came on stage. Not enough.
Not the band's own fault at all, but this show was ruined. The bombastic metropolian backdrop videos couldn't save it. No comparison to what could have been. And all I got in return was an audience mask - which due to my glasses I could only wear in the back of my head. The only reason I even stayed for the full show and didn't wander off to the
Next Stage or the
Hall of Fame was, that I wanted to be in the first row for the next show...
Oh thank the Noise Lord that this was the karmatic balance! Every encounter with
Big|Brave from Canada just confirms and deepens my love for this band. And luckily their first appearance on the
Main Stage - only one year after opening
Roadburn in the
Koepelhal - was no exception from this rule.
Most of the stage was left unused, as the band and their amps came close to the audience as a unit of massive sonic and emotional power and perfect chemistry. On this tour the guitar/guitar/drums trio was aided by
My Disco bass player and spiritual brother
Liam Andrews and it was a perfect match, even adding some new flavours to the phenomenal material from the album
"Nature Morte", which was played in its entirety.
Piercing through and howling over the wall of enormous minimalist/maximalist Drone Rock
Robin Wattie's unmistakable charismatic voice refined the performance to perfection. Yet still I especially enjoyed the rendition of the instrumental track "My Hope Renders Me a Fool".
All of this was nothing but crushing bliss!
Oh dear, this is the controversial one. For me the show of
Zola Jesus actually wasn't all that bad, but it wasted a lot of its potential with unnecessary flaws. And of course the whole premise of this performance made you question: Why?
I wasn't surprised by the singer performing with a band including a real drummer, because a good portion of her recent album
"Arkhon" feels much more like a band album than her previous output. However the kind of band she had put together went for a very different sludgy Doom Metal sound, which in itself was a weird concession to what the festival had been all about several years ago in the past.
And since
her amazing Roadburn debut in 2018 had been such a crucial precedent for meaningful Electronic Pop music working at this festival, which opened the door for many other artists in its wake, absolutely noone demanded from her to be someone else now.
But I will give her the benefit of doubt and assume that the only reason she came up with her new
Doom Chanteuse persona was that she just fucking wanted to do it. And that's fine with me.
And the ingredients for this were fine: Her voice as dramatic and belting as ever, yet sometimes a little more raw and witchy evil. The viola / keyboard player we knew from her previous band. A bassist with an obliterating Drone Metal sound. And of course the drummer.
The execution however just seemed under-rehearsed and unfinished.
Zola even mentioned that they had only practiced for a couple of days - and it showed. Obviously it wasn't enough time to flesh out the arrangements to a standard that would work after the tight, well attuned Drone power of
Big|Brave - on a festival that has seen all the best female-fronted bands in Doom and adjacent genres.
Many fans were mainly blaming the sound (which had some issues at the beginning) and the drumming, which in my opinion was rather a symptom than a cause of the problem. The beats were just painfully basic at times, like the first draft the man was handed:
Let's start with you playing this, so you get to know the song and then you'll go from there and we'll find the final form. But the
"going from there" part somehow never happened.
As it was presented here better solutions would have been to go fully
Sunn O))) and omit rhythm altogether or to choose overtly electronic heavy
Godflesh beats. That or back to scratch!
So
Nika, if you're doing this thing again - please overhaul these arrangements! I enjoyed certain aspects of this dark performance, but other parts were subpar and unworthy of your reputation. Why didn't you just ask Sludge collaboration professionals
Thou in the first place and made this a surprise show?
CLASHBURN:
You know what, I'm not going into the details of all the stuff I would have loved to see, because I frankly had almost the whole Sunday schedule marked as interesting.
The most conspicuous part of my personal schedule were of course those three Main Stage shows in a row, which most painfully made me miss (both at the same time) Wayfarer and Nicole Dollanganger.
I could easily have stayed for number four being Cave In playing their latest double album "Heavy Pendulum", but instead I continued my unfortunate tradition of dismissing performances involving the great Stephen Brodsky, just because I wanted to get outside and say goodbye to the Hall of Fame, too. Plus a certain guitar player from Big|Brave playing there was also a pretty irresistible prospect:
The stage setup was simple, but one of my favorites of the whole festival: just three guitar stacks, one pedal board, one dude with his instrument. You knew what you were getting into.
Mat Ball's perfect Drone ritual felt like a beautiful appendix to the Big|Brave show, as if you were trapped in one sweet moment of that, magnified and stretched into infinity. It was an immersive celebration of tone, one of those sonic experiences just making me want to bathe in the soundwaves.
CLASHBURN (reprise):
Mat Ball was one of the hardest shows to leave early, and for a while I had actually anticipated to stay for its whole duration and then proceed with the final Hall of Fame performance, which would be Filmmaker.
But with the last-minute announcement of yet another surprise show, there suddely was an insane South American / African double whammy closing the festivities on the Next Stage. And I didn't want to witness that madness from the doorframe of the crowded room.
The polyrhythmic noisy sound of the Brazilian trio Deafkids was dominated by restless tribalistic beats. Combined with simplistic bass lines offering orientation, droning electronics, harsh guitar noise and vocals that were more effect than voice, Deafkids avoided melodies and even guitar riffs beyond brief and primitive patterns, creating a not at all traditonal, yet extremely primal sound.
There were points where I would have liked a little more dramatic structure, because the duration and sequence of passages seemed very random, but I guess that's also part of the charme: Punkish, but still somehow sophisticated. And once again classification remains an impossible task. In doubt Noise. I can't really think of a band I could compare with these boys. Banger!
Ok, full disclosure: I had seen
Deafkids supporting
Oranssi Pazuzu in Hamburg last year, and since they're still doing the same crazy high energy shit and everything still applied, I just lazily copy-pasted the whole review. Come on, how often do you get the chance to do that in a
Roadburn write-up? I just couldn't resist. Great band!
Last party of Roadburn 2023! Since Deafkids and Duma had performed a collaborative comissioned show the day before, it was only logical that the honour of closing the event on the Next Stage was given to the Kenyan-Ugandan duo. And oh boy, what a way to kick out the lights it was!
In dense smoke and full-automatic stroboscopic fire their relentless, dystopian, chaotic Electronic Black Metal Industrial Extremecore Noise pushed the boundaries of what can still somehow be considered Metal to its outmost rim. Redefining Heaviness indeed! And as alien and sensory overloading this assault was - it totally sucked you into its brutal vortex. Music from another planet, but simultaneously a completely adequate mirror of our world.
Intense intense intense. Duma.
The end.
Walter, Becky and all those other hands and hearts involved did it again! What an edition of Roadburn. Maybe it didn't have that special momentum of relief like last year, when we were finally coming back after the long pandemic break. But it surely was was as determined and mind-blowing in its vision as ever.
Making sense of the chaotic world around us by amplifying, cultivating and structurizing the turmoil of our existence. Or countering it by reaching out to the adrift and establishing connections. Those were just some of the threads I saw reflected in the wide kaleidoscope of its artists. This will stay with me... at least until next April.
There's still a lot to be processed and with that the impact of what I've seen and heard might change as time moves on, but for now - and with the special rule of including only one performance per each stage -, these are my TOP 6 favorite shows of Roadburn 2023:
- OTAY:ONII (Hall of Fame)
- AD NAUSEAM (The Engine Room)
- a tie between BELL WITCH and BIG|BRAVE (Main Stage)
- POIL UEDA (Paradox)
- DUMA (Next Stage)
- ELIZABETH COLOUR WHEEL & ETHAN LEE MCCARTHY (The Terminal)
- OFFROAD BONUS: YANTRAS (LOC Brewery)
For the first time ever tickets for next timen already went on sale immediately after the current edition. Well, my wallet doesn't feel the pain right now anyway, right?
reviews of the other festival days:
- Canned Beer, Chlamydia and Digestive Disaster! -
- Hold Christmas Sacred! -
- Redefining Eternity: A Journey Through Timelessness -
- Resources of Suffering, Means of Catharsis -
