It’s the weekend of Desertfest and thus we at The Quietus have compiled some music to unleash your inner and outer hairy; music that will make you want to leap on the pyre, touch the blue touch paper and torch yourself into a flaming horn-throwing mockery of humanity. All the bands playing The Quietus’s stage at Camden Underworld on Saturday are represented, as well as some personal selections from all across the musical map – all in the spirit of the extreme clattering noise that the line up promises. It may not all be metal, but it is ALL. VERY. HEAVY. Soon, fanatics, we clash horns, leg wrestle and play dice with hooded strangers, but for now blast this playlist while you choose from your rack of medieval weaponry and cover your body in mud like Arnie in Predator. It’s a heaviness war, and you motherfuckers don’t look like losers to me…
Circle – Havuportti
Because even the heaviest days have a morning and one must never fight the morning for the same reason you must never arm wrestle a Finnish fisherman: it’s a lot older and stronger than you are. Hear every car that goes by your ineptly soundproofed window as the heartbeat of the new rising sun. Step into every light. Sometimes (hey!) it’s a sunrise, sometimes (ouch!) it’s a bus.
Slabdragger – Murkey Fen
Slabdragger exhilerati! No bog dwellers they! Hauling themselves from the muck their cry is simply that of freedom! Their fingers move slowly, but their eyes dart quick and shifty. Don’t dare bet against them to provide pre-humanoid thrills. You were protoplasm once, motherfucker. Get back there!
Prurient – Cocaine Death
Eyes down and to the right, there to see a spider and her webs, all jangling and bejeweled like Paris Hilton’s car keys.
Arabrot – The Baron
Children shepherded by wheel handed titans through unmapped forests. Marched to châteaus where single towers open-mouthedly drink the wind. Stone awaits them, tears drunk from goblets, The Baron shakes off his shroud…
Horseback – Thee Cult of Henry Flynt
Flynt’s violin gouges the stars a new beginning. All the spacemen and all the forest dwellers and all the shoe shop workers and levellers and toilers look up into the hole where the firmament just was. How can you recognise an absence in a blackness? Look in.
Hey Colossus – English Flesh
Because the only art that makes sense these days is a picture of a starfish, next to a picture of a nebula, next to a picture of a crashed aircraft. And if you’re going to straddle the rivers of antiquity you best make damn sure you can’t be taken down.
11 Paranoias – Turn to Stone
The chant will never be interrupted. Black shapes will forever slither onto our shores, bidden or not. Your agency in this matter is so much hippo spit.
Blackhouse – The 2 Classes of People
How many Hallelujahs make a right? How do you even spell Hallelujah? Strikes me that if it’s so hard to spell we probably shouldn’t be that bothered about it any more. Modernist impulse. You guys carry on.
The Body – Shrouded
The terrifying thing about The Body is that they imagine the hideous scenario in the video as being THEIR future. Yours, too? No, they couldn’t give less of a fuck about that. Sayonara, you canned goods lacking asshole.
Bo Diddley – She’s Fine, She’s Mine
Heavier and more unhinged than a suit of armour falling down a well. Bo knows it is so…
Dragged Into Sunlight – Boiled Angel
Like a Minotaur squatting upon a pile of skulls. Dragged Into Sunlight. Imagine the pain of it – your face flaking like Nosferatu under a halogen lamp. Provide no resistance! Merely yield!
Rainbow – Stargazer
Because if you think that after all that misery and desolation I’m going to go home without listening to the greatest song ever sung from the perspective of a mediaeval slave building a sorcerer’s castle then you are very much mistaken, my friend.
