KADAVAR / THE SHRINE / HORISONT / SATAN’S SATYRS | LIVE REVIEW
The Globe, Cardiff, Fri 13 Nov
Traversing Europe in a bus that you might expect to carry one very big band, but in this case holds four moderately popular ones, you’ve gotta love package tours like the one that’s landed here. Featuring two American groups, a Swedish quintet and German headliners Kadavar, everyone involved is dedicated to the cause of dressing like it’s 1974 and playing music to match. Each band tonight have their own spin on retrograde hard rock, or prog, or proto-metal, but either way you can choose to accept this shameless mining of the past, or get on home.
Satan’s Satyrs, from Virginia, open proceedings at 7pm, leaving me requiring a taxi and an undignified 100-yard jog to the venue to catch them. The 25 or so other people who manage this get treated to their ultra-fuzzed, greasy biker blast, equal parts Blue Cheer, Pentagram and Mudhoney. They finish with Alucard, from their superlative debut album Wild Beyond Belief!, before Gothenburg’s Horisont remove all traces of punk from the stage with a 10-minute opening song, the keyboard-and-vocoder-heavy Odyssey.
Horisont [pictured] have tunes for days – echoing Judas Priest on Bad News, Rainbow on The Night Stalker – but are so dedicated to providing time-specific theatre, it seems remiss that the beer cans on the amps are Carling and not Watney’s Red Barrel. Vocalist Axel Söderberg is the star of the show, with his Quo backpatch and keyboard parts which can be played with one hand while he grasps the mic stand with the other.
“Welcome to… THE SHRINE!!” hollers Josh Landau, frontman of Californian trio The Shrine, who seem still more willing to laugh at themselves. Their opening song appears to have the lyrical refrain, “we’ve been taking drugs”; a subsequent number is “about the power of rock’n’roll”. They most prominently remind me of Moistboyz, an intentionally dumb metal sideproject of the band Ween, rather than anyone more settled in the hard rock canon.
Kadavar, it transpires, didn’t just draw their headliner status out of the hat. The Berlin trio are granted a 90-minute set (none of the other bands got much more than half an hour), train spotlights on a backline of amps which clearly aren’t all switched on, and after about four songs of Zeppelin pomp and Sabbath thud have inspired crowdsurfers and a clodhopping moshpit. They’re the only band tonight to exude actual alpha maleness: there’s no obvious irony on show, nor insights into their personality, although if towering drummer Christoph Bartelt stood up and proclaimed himself “a golden god”, many here would likely go along with it.
A Kadavar set is very silly fun presented in a very serious way, which has fuelled many a great heavy rock band before now; they’re not doing anything transcendent, but they have a knack for sneakily killer riffs, and the success they’ve had so far is both understandable and tough to begrudge.
words NOEL GARDNER