Narc. Magazine Online
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Lee Fisher enjoys a night of bleakly glorious and genuinely ecstatic sounds courtesy of Smote
Image: Smote by Lee Fisher
I have to confess Penelope Trappes didn’t connect at all tonight, which was disappointing because I had high hopes. The presentation didn’t help – it was Deeply Serious European Art Goth (think Nina Hagen meets Mrs Havisham) – and it was all very po-faced. To be fair, this all seemed to be very personal and intense and troubled, no complaints about her commitment, but there wasn’t much to hold on to, song wise. There was some interesting cello, a guitar was tortured to decent effect, and she produced some remarkable sounds from her tabletop shenanigans, but it was just so solemn and stagey. I suspect the music might work much better at home, late at night accompanied by a snakebite and black, but live it was way too panto for my delicate sensibilities.
No such issues with Smote, who have gone from seeming mildly interesting just a few years ago to being a band that bowl me over a little more every time I see them. Tonight they’re joined by Laura (Late Girl) on violin and analogue synth, bringing some wonderful John Cale drone and Eno/Dik Mik textures to a sound that was already pretty immense. As the music hits you in waves, you’ve got time to admire the way Daniel Foggin is so focussed, so controlled, so precise in his movements, especially when coaxing feedback from his guitar – there’s no rock ’n’ roll excess here, just small exact shifts that put his guitar in exactly the right position to make his amp wail. It’s staggering how such an unshowy band can produce some of the most monumental music around. Brooding basslines build tension, circling drum patterns bring a martial vibe (and man, that drummer is a beast). They can sound like a bloody pagan ritual, or a spacecraft plunging into a black hole (or whatever spacecraft do around black holes, god knows), or music soundtracking our burning world’s end. In fact, you could replace the Wagner on the Melancholia soundtrack with Smote and it’d work a treat. There was also a deeply affecting ritualistic number – complete with chanting – that could have served as the hymn in the Bomb Worship scene in Beneath The Planet of The Apes. Basically, Smote are VERY cinematic. There were times, when the band really dug into a riff and let it build, that they were genuinely ecstatic, recalling peak Swans or Just Say No-era Gnod or Glenn Branca’s Ascension. Plus they had all the volume Earth lacked a few weeks back (big up Ross Lewis) and induced blissed out grins, rapturous whoops and some terrible ‘dancing’. Gloriously bleak, bleakly glorious.
