Sun 18 Apr
Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff
You may be aware of the term ‘amateurs’ night’, as used by functioning alcoholics in regard to dates like bank holidays and Black Friday, and the related tendency for occasional drinkers to overestimate their limits and render town centres a sea of chunder. This gig, the second to last on a UK tour that matches Sheffield’s Rolo Tomassi with California’s Trash Talk (plus Throats from the Midlands, who I see too little of to offer much useful opinion), is frankly a bit amateurs’ night. Not in the sense that the crowd is overly drunk, although parts of it are – it’s just that one gets the impression of overly self-conscious kids giving their mosh ‘skills’ a rare outing and betraying their lack of practice in this field. (Top tip: if people are standing at the side not dancing, don’t barge into them, otherwise when someone eventually twats you one you will deserve it.)
Trash Talk, despite playing music with no obvious mass appeal – short, fast and chaotic explosions of hardcore punk with a foot in the hyperbolic hardcore subgenre of ‘powerviolence’ – have recently found favour in both mainstream music media and youthful rock circles. As with Gallows and Fucked Up, two punk bands who have ascended from under to overground in recent times, this has generated breathless chatter about their live performances being unfettered, blood-soaked maelstroms of animal fury. Although TT vocalist Lee Spielman attains a small headwound, and a cap-wearing, hugely inebriated boy concusses himself, in the main it’s less than terrifying.
Despite Spielman having very little to say, and rather naffly entering the stage a few minutes after the band start playing, Trash Talk are entertaining enough, downtuning to a sludge metal depth but playing at the frantic pace of Palatka or Ruination or some other 90s bands no-one much cares about. A whole set of bangers like Sacramento Is Dead, from 2007’s Walking Disease, and less 60-second pauses between 60-second songs would justify the h*pe.
Rolo Tomassi, who release their second album Cosmology in just over a month (keyboard player James Spence apologises for its delay but states their intention to darn well play the new songs anyway – I should think so too), have not made their name through antagonism and putative danger. If anything, their inherent niceness has won them respect – they are friendly sorts who have not forgotten their roots in the UK’s hardcore underbelly.
Moreover, they have evolved into an excellent band who are doing something which sounds like little but themselves. There are shards of brutal prog, vintage math-rock, fretboard botherers like The Dillinger Escape Plan and synth-led sweetness in here – and on Cosmology, improbably produced by Diplo – but at no point does it sound like they’re merely trying on styles for size. Of the new cuts, Party Wounds, aside from a cringeworthy lyric about “movers and shakers and candlestick makers”, works well while seemingly cribbing from both 90s technical hardcore bruisers Botch and airy math-popsters Deerhoof; Kasia stretches out its space-rock intro before grinding through several identifiable and dizzying parts.
Main vocalist Eva Spence, who is 19 years old and looks younger still (I realise there is no non-creepy way of musing on this), has become an involving and personable frontlady, amidst a band who, as much as they’re loved by The Kids, are regrettably underrated by those who seek thrills on rock music’s fringes.