Live: Sonic Jesus (Album Launch) & The Underground Youth – The Waiting Room, London 16.04.2015

I appreciate that people generally make the pilgrimage TO Ireland, but this was one divine intervention I was not going to miss for anything…

Two years in the making and the day finally arrives for the official unveiling of the debut album by Sonic Jesus – ‘Neither Virtue Nor Anger’. (Full LP Review to follow).

In a repeat of last year’s Fuzz Club Stage billing at Eindhoven Psych Lab, Sonic Jesus and The Underground Youth take The Waiting Room by storm, for this Bad Vibrations & Fuzz Club Records presentation.

With a summer release date slated for The Underground Youth’s new album ‘Haunted’, there is a palpable sense of anticipation in the packed venue when they take the stage, kicking off their european tour.

The Underground Youth get things underway with ‘Lost Recording’ from 2010’s ‘Sadovaya’, a smouldering low-key track, hushing the converted before launching into ‘In The Dark I See’, releasing the building tension.

First single, ‘Collapsing Into Night’ from new album ‘Haunted’ is up next for a welcome taster of the new material, an atmospheric, brooding love story.

We are treated to a further medley of tracks form Craig Dyer’s prodigious output, visiting the full spectrum from tortured introspection to euphoric release.

 

‘Rules Of Attraction’ brings The Underground Youth’s assured and measured set to a shuddering climax.

Sonic Jesus take to the cramped stage to rapturous applause, launching headlong into an all too brief selection of the 16 meisterwerks that make up their debut LP ‘Neither Virtue Nor Anger’…

The now somehow even more packed Waiting Room is treated to a virtuoso performance. Sonic Jesus are a band on form and on fire. This London gig finds them around mid-way through a european tour, so the set is as tight as fuck, this is less of a gig and more of a happening.

I was so carried away on the surging electric current, that before you knew it most of the night had evaporated in a blur. Already monumental tracks on vinyl, ‘Locomotive’, ‘Drift 22’, ‘Whore  Is Death’, ‘Lost Reprise’ and ‘Telegraph’, morph live into an explosive, dynamic coup de grâce, pummelling the assembled into submission.

With barely enough room to literally swing a cat, MDME SPKR aka Laurie Battie is somehow shoehorned on stage for the pyroclastic ‘Reich’.

 All too quickly, particularly for bands of the calibre of The Underground Youth and Sonic Jesus, both with enough aural delights at their command to warrant 90 – 180 minutes each on stage, the night draws to a tumultuous, distorted, fuzzed out righteous climax.

Few gigs will meet the measure of this truly memorable night, the Sonic Jesus track ‘Triumph’ is the perfect summation, both in terms of the outstanding quality of the performances on stage, and in terms of the release of ‘Neither Virtue Nor Anger’.

The afterglow embers were once more fanned into flame back at Fuzz Club HQ. Their was warmth and camaraderie in abundance, and it was a privilege to spend a couple of hours as part of the Fuzz Club Family, this thing that Casper Dee has evolved is to be applauded at every level.

Count yourself lucky if you have either of these bands playing anywhere near where you live, it was only 322 miles as the crow flies for me but I would have happily walked, on the way home – I floated…

‘Neither Virtue Nor Anger’ is available NOW from Fuzz Club Records, if it hasn’t already sold out.

Find more by Chromaticism here.