Meltdown 2007
Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
18th June 2007
The smoke and glitter which characterises Chrome Hoof‘s performance at Meltdown 2007 is something of a wonder to behold. Unleashing a brain-boggling riot of progtastic disco – complete with intoned disclaimer for any responsibilty for the effect of the show on the audience at the start, this thirteen-piece bunch of silver-clad space invaders proceed to set out to do their level best to give the term weirdo a good name.
It’s a good thing that Chrome Hoof have a stage big enough to fit them all on with room to spare, and it later becomes apparent that the troupe will make the most of the freedom a nice bit of artistic real estate offers. There is a string section, a horn section, two drummers and a pair of spangled dancers whose prop horns double up as beam weapons to make the effects unit on the Buck Rogers Saturday morning picture show proud. Decked out in more glittering robes than a gathering of the Venusian chamber of commerce circa Nineteen Twenty, Chrome Hoof set out on tightly-orchestrated voyage which soon blossoms into a full-blown galactic funk metal extravaganza worthy of the deranged excesses of Sun Ra‘s live show. This is the kind of psychedelic kitsch which succeeds so well because the band take the show just about as seriously as it needs to be, playing it as straight as possible when the guitarists have a tendency to wear shining steel helmets and brandish flourescent, barbed axes.
Musically Chrome Hoof exist at the hazy juntion where disco merges with space rock, where freeform jazz funk splashes down on the borders of the Canturbury Scene’s legacy, passing through a time warp to one of the more outré worlds imagined by Edgar Rice Burroughs and the lysergical brainwaves still rippling down from Hawkwind‘s performances of the Space Ritual tour, glowing all the while with some kind of strange electronic radiation (or that’s what the sensors indicate). There’s a touch of Gilli Smith vs Eartha Kitt about singer Lola Olafisoye, who holds charismatic court like a brash queen of the spaceways while the band shift gear from Magma-magnitude grandiosity to delicate chamber interludes, offset into the world of strange by stage-sweeping figures and the occasional drum duet, never mind solos. But the piece de resistance comes in the shape of the gigantic glowing green-eyed silver goat monster which lurches onstage in gouts of smoke and mind-battering strobes, as laughable as and way more impressive than anything Iron Maiden could ever begin to dream up.
Despite breaking the spell of weirdness by announcing their last song – as if they were a mere band of entertainers playing a show! – the finale surges once more into the by now relative normailty of the skiffy disco blast, which by rights would have the audience making some seriously groovy moves if only it were not a seated venue.
Pray that when the aliens overlords come down to earth in a fleet of horribly-beweaponned flying saucers that they are half as funked-up with intent as Chrome Hoof. Keep watching the skies.
If Chrome Hoof are jaw dropping for their outrageous take on the unearthly delights of interplanetary Romance, Sunn 0))) are prepared to push the envelope of suspended disbelief even further, swathing the their enourmously impressive stack of (suitably monolithic) backlit amps and the rest of the stage in more smoke than even Faust tend to let loose on an unsuspecting venue.
Despite the odd nervous titter and yelp of encouragement from the crowd, a bated hush descends in the gloom as a mordant whisper sussurates and a scraping drone announces this most portentous of bands. The cowled and freakish figure of Attila Csihar from Mayhem slowly stumbles into the fog-shrouded stage front, intoning an incantation of suitably high weirdness as the doom drone rises with the gouts of green-hued, feedback-flavoured smoke. Barely visible is the hooded and robed shade of Steve Stapleton of Nurse With Wound, who helps keep the low end mood suitably avant, building a clangour of chimes and scrapes, working his bowed guitar with a sinister motion reminiscent of the sawing of bones.
Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson are barely visible through the murk, an occasional fist or devil horns rising above the glowing amplifier cliff face at the peak of any particular seismic riff, or the shade of a pointy guitar in robed hands between them as Sunn0))) play on with the slow motion of a behemoth sound which eventually seems to envelop the unknown reaches of a very bleak space where the stars have grown dim – never mind the mere auditorium back on earth. All the while, Attila assumes the form of a great old bearded one with an unheimlich ability to hiss backwards as D.O.R‘s Rhodes swirls into the ritual of drone which by now has, thanks to the door-rattling bass, created some kind of brown – never mind black – mass and transformed the Queen Elizabeth Hall into a veritable cathederal of doom.
-Richard Fontenoy-
