We put our eardrums to their sternest test yet with an evening of noise-rock!
We’ve just passed the 31st anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death, and it’s safe to say that the much-missed Nirvana frontman would approve heartily of tonight’s bill of noise-mongers at the New Cross Inn. After all, in terms of influences, the four bands are mining the likes of ‘Scentless Apprentice’ infinitely more than a certain deodorant-inspired hit single. Plus, only a fiver a ticket? Have we actually stepped into a time warp back to 1994?!
Occupants are a trio of non-conformists; this much is obvious when we realise that their guitarist is performing minus his shoes. Fuck shoes – they’re so predictable. Oh, and their bassist sometimes plays CHORDS (à la Lemmy); all the better for creating a sound that rumbles like an out-of-control monster truck. There’s some serious guitar abuse going on here too, and if you’d care to imagine the Jesus Lizard’s David Yow fronting a punked-up Kyuss, you wouldn’t be miles away from ‘Introvert (Dig)’ or ‘Relaxer’. So well do the trio gel onstage, you’d swear they were communicating telepathically. Superb.
Luxury Apartments go for a more straight-up punk rock approach, but are still potent as hell, blasting away any remaining mental cobwebs in the crowd. There’s even an element of surf rock to the likes of ‘Animals Eat For Free’ and ‘Life Behind Bars’, although it’s been twisted into something far more sinister-sounding than Dick Dale would have ever recognised. London doesn’t need more luxury apartments, but with sets like this, it absolutely needs more Luxury Apartments. (Cheers – I’ll be here all evening.)
Predeceased take us by surprise – we weren’t expecting things to get so, um, angular and flat-out unhinged. Interlacing their songs with samples, they fearlessly take riffs from the schools of Killing Joke and (yep!) Nirvana, and feed them through a hardcore blender; the results sound so damn huge, they’re irresistible. The guitars on ‘Fake Laugh’ sound like they’re strung with barbed wire, and the rhythm section on ‘Plague Trains’ is seriously seismic; we kind of fear for the New Cross Inn’s foundations. On an evening of very few fucks given, you get the sense that Predeceased give the fewest fucks of anyone present, and for that, we salute them. Check out them out NOW, and thank us later.
Belgian headliners Ronker, on the other hand, look they’re having the most fun, all headbanging away enthusiastically during the opening ‘Professional Facebreaker’. They have quite the sense of humour, but then what would you expect from a band who titled their album ‘Fear Is A Funny Thing, Now Smile Like A Big Boy’? And Is their vocalist/guitarist trying to come across as some kind of doomsday preacher? Whenever he’s not unleashing sonic chaos from his instrument, he’s balancing atop the monitors, gesticulating wildly at us.
That album is excellent, and it sounds even better live; ‘Slow Murder’, in particular, deserves to be greeted with seething pits everywhere it’s played, whilst that stop-start riff from old favourite ‘Shame’ continues to ricochet around our brains long into the next day. It’s a shame that there aren’t more people here to witness it all; suffice to say that all four bands are proof enough that noise-rock is alive, well and thriving in 2025. Cheers to all involved!
All Photos: ALEX GOOSE
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I spend my days teaching English to foreign students, and my evenings attending as many gigs as possible. Raised mainly on a diet of 90s third-wave punk, my tastes have grown to include just about anything from trad ska to thrash metal. The Ramones are my musical gods.
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