Årabrot / Rabbits / Bastard Of The Skies Tonight At The Star & Garter, Manchester!
The Sleeping Shaman has once again teamed up by the ever reliable Future Noise for a rare gig featuring a heavy and demented tripple header by way of Norwegian noise rock behemoths Årabrot, the heavy, twisted and deranged trio from Portland, Rabbits and opening the night are Blackburns very own noisy sludge rockers Bastard Of The Skies.
The gig takes place at, well where else, The Star & Garter, Fairfield Street, Manchester tonight, that’s the 15th October, damage is just a fiver, doors open at 7.30pm and there’s a Facebook event set up HERE, let’s just hope those corporate wankers have taken the fence down and we can get into the car park!
Read on for more info about each band…
Årabrot
Just before going on a slew of UK tour dates, Arabrot mainman Kjetil, was diagnosed with cancer. Now, Årabrot are back: One tumour down, 35 stitches over the neck up – and more brazen than ever. On oct 11th the mini-album I Modi will be released, a lugubrious masterpiece of the Renaissance reworked to six tracks of industrial and majestic rock’n’roll.
In the desolate Swedish countryside stands an abandoned chapel, now functioning as home and operational HQ of Årabrot. In a matter of a few weeks in the summer of 2014, the sparse congregation hall was cleared of benches and filled with amps, drums and cymbals to make two related albums: Årabrot‘s I Modi and Okkultokrati’s Night Jerks.
I Modi is thematically a continuation of last year’s equally indecent mini-album Murder As Art, but this time loaded with heavier cannons. Contributors include members of Okkultokrati and Haust, electronica chameleon Karin Park, studio production by rock-prince Milton von Krogh (Pirate Love) and sonic alchymist and long time Årabrot-collaborator Stian Skagen (concept.virus).
This orgy of impressions places I Modi as an unicum in the Årabrot discography. The band has certainly been brutal before, but never as steamy and juicy as here. Erotica is timeless and it shows in the lyrical references. I Modi embraces everything from Roman parades with idols of Phalli to modern day smut. All united in an Arabrot with no time to waste and a bestial musical heritage to lay claim to.
Rabbits
With nearly thirty minutes of all new material, RABBITS’s inbound third LP undertaking, Untoward, captures the snarling trio’s most back-alley, gutter dredging, ultimately sinister cavalcade of captivatingly negative hymns yet, the record exhaustingly tracked live to tape at Type Foundry, Portland in one day and mixed in two.
The engineering duties on Untoward were tag-teamed by Jeremy Romagna, who recorded/mixed the band’s Lower Forms debut, their early 7” releases, all the covers on the band’s recent SOS collection, in addition to records from Trees, Tecumseh, Wives and more, and Fester, who recorded the band’s Bites Rites sophomore LP and subsequent splits with Whores and Årabrot, and a long line of other notable acts including Nux Vomica, Usnea, Stoneburner and others, then mastered by Ryan Foster at Foster Mastering.
Bastard Of The Skies
Blackburn’s unstoppable riff deviants Bastard Of The Skies further reinforce their potency of their hard-hitting, sludgy noise rock that captivated anyone subjected to their most recent full-length, 2012’s Tarnation. Their most recent release, the Split 12″ with Birmingham’s sludgers Grimpen Mire, see’s Bastard Of The Skies deliver cavernous, bass-heavy monsters like Yarn or closing behemoth, Old Vessels that will make side A’s twenty-minutes feel like twenty-years of ugliness, corruption and anger as the unstoppable mega-riffs pile around the poor listener.
