Location: Metelkova, Gromka
Date of the gig: April 7, 2012
Attendance: 100
Ticket price: €8.00
After Thursday’s punky jumping around and singing along, Saturday at Gromka promised a more serious kind of night. In bitterly cold weather, totally unfit for standing around outside clubs, Vulvathrone, Psychofagist and Fuck the Facts were getting ready in the guts of the venue. What all three bands have in common is unconventionality. To express their otherness they picked grindcore, which, judging by the show, is as wide as a porn star’s anus after a ten-stallion gangbang. Honestly, I mainly came to see the last act, Fuck the Facts. I didn’t exactly sweat over the support bands before the show. My bad. Vulvathrone are probably known to every slightly more serious follower of the scene. The real surprise for me, though, was Psychofagist.
Vulvathrone, probably thanks to all their road miles, can whip up an incredibly relaxed vibe. Their buddies in the crowd helped with that too, so at times I felt like I was at an extended band rehearsal. Despite the constant goofing around, luckily the playing doesn’t suffer for it. Probably the best grind outfit from our neck of the woods, they play every song raw and murderous. During the set the guitarist broke a string. The rest of the band didn’t get rattled and put on a »semi-stand-up« routine on stage that kept us entertained, while we wondered whether the maestro had gone off for a shit, until the founding member made it back on stage. They also had plenty of time to show off a wide catalog, and I walked off to the break a happy man.
It was really hard to get motivated and tune in to the next band, since expectations were rock bottom. The Italians Psychofagist clearly have their very own understanding of music. They play, um… progressive jazz grind? The catch being that truly orthodox grind moments are the rarest part, or they pop up when you least expect them. So the song structures swing from completely mellow jazz bits, where the drumming stands out with shimmering cymbals, to raging grind outbursts. Psychofagist use vocals minimally. Each song only has a few vocal lines. The music itself is very hard to listen to, but still good enough to keep the listener glued in front of the stage. If someone had taken a photo of me in front of the stage during the gig, the look on my face would’ve probably gotten me shipped straight off to a school for people with special needs. If you’re curious how it all sounds, click here. A video says more than a thousand words.
After the heavy intellectual challenges my two brain hemispheres had been sentenced to, the Italians were followed on stage by the Canadians Fuck the Facts. The band has put out eight full-length albums over its career. On top of that, their discography has a small sea of »splits« (»split releases«, usually with two, three bands at most) and EPs. Definitely enough to expect a confident performance. And we got one. On stage the band has two guitars that conjure up the sound of a rumbling thunderstorm. That’s how the show kicked off! To the rhythms of the Slovak anthem »Za Tatrami se bliska«. And the storm hit the venue fast. The two vocalists Fuck the Facts use added even more to the convincing atmosphere. Besides the bassist, there’s also a girl of hobbit proportions on vocals, with a hellish combination of vocal cords and respiratory system. The band’s music is a conglomerate of noise, a few strains of core and, of course, grind. In their otherwise »sped-up«, short songs, they find enough room for »groove« moments that force the listener – at least those without prejudices – to sway along. A seriously quality way to end the night.
This time I won’t get into the sound quality. At Gromka it’s always at about the same satisfactory level, which means it suits the genres that usually play that club’s stage. We flipped the rain the bird with all the action in the hall, though it joined us again on the way home, well, most of us anyway. Fuck the Facts, Fuck the Rain!
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