Live Review: Kube/Ufomammut

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Kube (B)

Ufomammut (ITA)

Sojo, Leuven - Sept. 24th, 2004.

A band like Kube - a three-piece from Brussels - is exactly the kind of band you need to support a band like Ufomammut. Like Alix a few months ago (who supported The Hidden Hand), Kube offered straightforward, no-frills groove rock, but whereas Alix certainly belong in the 'stoner'-category, Kube dabble in a less psychedelic and fuzzed-out direction. Nothing is wasted, just crunchy and muscular rock that incorporates elements from thrashy rock (there's definitely some Motörhead there), alt rock, heavy blues-rock with touches of metal (during songs like "New Life") and good old-fashioned rawk. They threw in a couple of swift instrumentals all wrapped up in driving rhythms and a muscular SG-sound coming straight from Let There Be Rock. Further influences? Masters of Reality perhaps, QOTSA and, as their Houdini-cover proved: Melvins. The band doesn't have a style that takes risks and they don't go in the red - that was never the intention, either - but I think most people enjoyed the power trio's tough yet accessible sound.

Ufomammut. Have you ever seen Godzilla? Not Godzilla himself, but the movie? Remember that annoying Jamiroquai song you'd hear on the radio, in shopping malls, subway stations, pubs, restaurants and airports? "I'm goin', I'm goin', I'm goin' deeper underground"? THAT song, indeed. Well, if the movie hadn't been such a cartoonish joke that did its best to escape the PG-rating and had been a truly horrifying piece of cinema with a dark atmosphere, gruesome slayings and explicit gore instead, then Ufomammut should have provided the soundtrack. When I hear the name Ufomammut, I think of Godzilla (the real one), I think of the words 'behemoth,' 'mammoth, 'massive' and 'immense'. I could also apply these terms to a band like Mastodon (and I did), who visited the Sojo in June, but there's a crucial difference between these bands. Despite the monumental heaviness, Mastodon is basically song-oriented, a frighteningly skilled bunch of musicians blending several genres and capturing a brutal sound in mostly 4 minute-chunks of violence and beauty. Ufomammut on the other hand, doesn't do songs, they do soundscapes. Taking elements from sludge-metal, doom, industrial, electro, space-rock, heavy acid-fried psych, stoner and stuff that's better suited as a movie score, they deliver this bulldozer grind that can't really be classified as music. When you go to a Ufomammut show, you're not gonna listen to music, because you're treated to an experience for all senses. They play so loud you'll feel the wind coming from all the amplifiers and it'll make your intestines scared as hell. If listening to Mastodon can give you an idea of what it's like to be on a battlefield with danger and noise coming from all sides, Ufomammut shows you what it's like to be trapped in quicksand, when e v e r y t h i n g b e c o m e s h e a v y a n d s l o w s d o w n . No up-tempo grooves, snappy guitar solos, throw-your-fist-in-the-air-riffs and sing-along melodies from these guys. Before the gig started and the guys were still adjusting all their gear onstage (the usual stuff, along with a bunch of analog synths and weird machines you sometimes see in '80's sci-fi movies) and Kyuss' "Green Machine" played in the background, you could already smell the anticipation in the air, and when they finally launched into a two hour-set of bludgeoning space-doom, the venue suddenly became the final dungeon of sanity. Something like that. Ufomammut makes you experience things differently, also because of the insane visual show (nauseating projections) that topped off the multi-sensorial experience. "Trampled Underfoot" is a song written with Ufomammut in mind, and when they tore through their two albums (Godlike Snake and Snailking, but please don't ask me about the complete set list), the repetitively crawling bass-lines, howled vocals, dragging grooves, crushing chords and neo-industrial sheets of noise and bleeps pinned the audience to the wall and they loved every single second of it. Even though no one really understood bass player/vocalist Urlo's gospel with the amount of effects and delay on his vocals, the band was worshipped like Italian Gods of the Apocalypse. With their alternation of short disjointed structures and extended trance-like pieces that crawled along like a slow Melvins-song at 16RPM (their latest album, Snailking, features a 28 minute-track), the band conjured up a racket, an aural terror, that was the industrial equivalent of Neurosis, Sleep and Electric Wizard. No, they're indeed not for everybody and I must admit I'd rather not see bands like this every weekend, but if you do manage to see them and can get into their music, you'll experience something you'd normally need quite a lot of drugs for. I don't even dare to imagine what the band sounds like during a bad trip. With their focus on sound and atmosphere, they're very dependent on the particular moment, the willingness of the audience to adjust their expectations about what rock should be and how it all gets translated into sonic waves, but… when all these elements do fall into their place, like at the Sojo, watching, hearing and feeling Ufomammut deliver the goods is quite an experience. Overwhelming.