The much ballyhooed reunion performance by GODFLESH at this year’s Hellfest Open Air in France over the weekend was unfortunately affected by issues out of the band’s control. Despite getting through the set, mainman Justin K. Broadrick was not pleased with the situation and issued the following recap:
“Okay, if you were in attendance for this then I am sure you are aware of how disappointed we were with what transpired, and we are sure you are/were most likely disappointed too.
“I am afraid that it was all utterly beyond our control, we salvaged a performance out of what was a fairly ridiculous set of events. The power generator blowing during the set from THE YOUNG GODS, on just prior to us, was the catalyst for the ensuing chaos. At one point, performing at all was even in doubt. We had an hour allocated for both soundcheck and stage set up, since there is no soundcheck prior to the start of the festival, unfortunately, something that we really did need, but we were having to put our trust in the one hour allocated before performance, this one hour then became 20 short and extremely stressful minutes, with the stage management proclaiming that we must start immediately without any check of the sound, disastrous for us – additionally, the backline they hired in for us was not entirely correct or had faults with it, Ben‘s bass rig specifically, my guitar amp was not right either, the monitors were awful without the time for us to correct them sufficiently, resulting in not hearing virtually any of the Machine in the monitors for nearly all of our opener ‘Like Rats‘, the DVD machine for our films was also somewhat faulty. In short, this was an absolute frustrating catalogue of disasters, presenting the band in, for us, one of the worst ways imaginable. We do though consider that we somewhat forged a performance out of a significantly bad situation.
“We played 40 of our intended 60 minutes; quite literally onstage I managed to turn 30 minutes into 40 due to ongoing arguments, during our set, with the stage management.
“We’re really sorry to everyone concerned that all this happened and hopefully this will all be rectified at the forthcoming GODFLESH performance at the Supersonic Festival.”
GREYMACHINE, the collaboration between JESU/GODFLESH‘s Justin K. Broadrick, ISIS‘ Aaron Turner, Diarmuid Dalton (JESU), and Dave Cochran (HEAD OF DAVID, GOD, ICE), will be releasing their debut album, Disconnected, on August 4th through Hydra Head Records.
GALLHAMMER is a most unique musical entity consisting of a trio of Japanese girls with only death and hopelessness on their mind. Dressed like crusty, black metal vixens, these unsuspecting ladies serve up an unfiltered blend of only the most primitive, HELLHAMMER-inspired nastiness on their second album, Ill Innocence. GALLHAMMER summons the nihilistic, punkified, black metal grimness of Norwegian black metallers, DARKTHRONE (who themselves can be traced back to HELLHAMMER), on tracks “Killed by the Queen” and the awesome “Speed of Blood.” They capture the authentic cold and stale black metal sound with blast beats, grinding riffs, suicidal screams, and raw production. Elsewhere, they perfect the doom and gloom of Swiss purveyors, HELLHAMMER (obviously their main musical influence). Song ideas are very, very simple, but Tokyo’s GALLHAMMER steer clear of sounding like high-school beginners. Quite interestingly, in fact, is that their songs draw influences from various “indie” or post-punk musical nebulas. “Delirium Daydream” could resemble the early, unpolished works of anyone from JOY DIVISION to PJ Harvey. Of course that may be hard to envision given the band’s (black) metal roots. More appropriately relative would be Justin K. Broadrick (JESU/GODFLESH), in which the dreamy epic, “Slog,” is very reminiscent of (save for the blasting interlude). Though GALLHAMMER are clearly very singular in their musical approach, they succeed by assembling basic ideas effectively and unexpectedly. If you tire of dense, over-the-top ridiculousness, invert your diet with a sampling of Ill Innocence. (Peaceville)