Blind Monarch / Cestode @ The Peer Hat, Manchester, 21st August 2024

If you take a quick look at how Blind Monarch are described on their Spotify account, it says they ‘weave moments of a dubious beauty into a corrupted majesty of ugliness and despair’, then you know that you aren’t going to be in for a night of high-pitched airy-fairy pop blandness with bouncing moments of teary singalong’s. Instead, you are getting a band who spit directly in the eyes of Satan as they shout ‘bring it on motherfucker’ before they butcher you with their funeral gloom of down tuned bass and desolate drumbeats.

I headed up to Manchester, going to a venue I’d never been to before, The Peer Hat, to look forward to the Sleeping Eye promoted night of cheery music, ha ha!!! As I walk down the stairs to the small basement venue, it seemed a perfect place for the filth that would be spewed forth tonight as the first few rumbling notes from German sludge metallers Cestode began tonight’s deafening workshop.

A three-piece from Berlin, with Leopold playing drums as well as being the vocalist, a somewhat novel approach, but this doesn’t hamper his thunderous drumming as they start off their set with Untitled. I had a quick chat with him at the end, just to get the song titles they played, as I thoroughly enjoyed their set, with their slow, sludge music being quite vicious in parts.

With most songs coming from their 2023 release Flesh we get the brutal Recollection Void with the bass sound bouncing off the walls, ending with loads of feedback before a slow guitar intro and guttural scream signal the beginning of Restricted. Some chaotic drumming prompts the beginning of the superb Bloated Bodies which felt like a drill going into your skull.

‘We are Cestode from Germany, thanks for coming out and watching us and Blind Monarch, we have two more songs for you’ is the only vocal interaction we got tonight, but who cares when the music speaks for itself. Exuvium has an evil and sinister guitar intro and loads of ear-piercing feedback as they round off their set with Mineral Decay. They leave to loud applause from the decent size crowd leaving us all with that ringing in your ears that comes from watching a proper noisy band.

With the crowd starting to pile back in, Blind Monarch step onto the tiny stage, and begin their aural assault on our senses with their own heavy nasty filthy doom. It felt like a gig from about twenty years ago as the four-piece headed straight into Other Faces the opening track of their latest release The Dead Replenish The Earth. With vocalist Tom Blyth standing slightly off the, albeit small, stage and facing to the right of the crowd as Paul Hubbard‘s bass is low and grumbling and working well with the drum sound of Sam Elsom.

Heads and bodies in the crowd are doing that slow swaying motion that you only get at a sludge metal gig, with the solo bass sections rattling your bones, but when they all strike their notes at the same time, it’s akin to a sonic explosion. The thirteen-minute track feels so damn good that you don’t want it to end. But end it does, and they summon up the eerie opening to Diminishing which feels much slower, with the heavy bass and strummed guitar from Adam Blyth.

Then it all goes wild, still slow and low, but heavy as fuck, as we suddenly get smoke spilling out of somewhere from the venue. The tempo gets a bit faster, the guitar playing standing out, but with the one pluck bass notes it gets as crazy as crazy can be with their brand of brutish sludge.

The final song of the night is also from their latest offering, title track, The Dead Replenish The Earth, which is a cracker. The energy feels higher from both the band and the crowd, and it’s as if we are all one entity, rhythmically swaying together. Blyth’s solo midway just feels so damn good, and it wraps up almost thirty minutes of live music that has captivated the audience and left us all with tinnitus.

Tom explained later that they didn’t want to play the fourth song off the album as they hadn’t rehearsed it much and didn’t want a lazy ending to the set, so with three songs, they completely nailed and I headed back down the M6 with a huge smile on my face, as my night of ugliness and despair had been fulfilled.

Blind Monarch

Cestode

Scribed by: Matthew Williams
Photos by: Lee Edwards