Live Review : Damnation Festival on November 4th 2023 (Part I)

We all love to moan. We are British. Finding fault in everything is our national sport. However the truth is, no matter how hard you look, there is very little, if anything, to criticise about this year’s Damnation Festival (The puddle at the end of the drive may well have been a pain but it was clearly outside of Gav and Paul’s jurisdiction). The snag list from last year's inaugural edition at the BEC arena has been conclusively dealt with. There is not a food queue to be seen, chairs are plentiful, and I am still supping the specially commissioned stout well into Saturday night.

As fans, we are treated as peers rather than commodities and the festival is designed to be a pleasant experience as opposed to an endurance event. The rooms are full enough to provide an immersive atmospheric experience but are never inaccessible. If you want to get to the front to join the melee during say Deadguy you can, if you want to lurk in the shadows at the fringes of the venue and soak in Downfall of Gaia, then there is space to do that too. The sound is pristine from start to finish (aside from Katatonia’s technical glitches) and the production values are utterly astounding. Frankly, Damnation ’23 gets everything right.

And we haven’t mentioned the performances yet. Every one of the twenty-four bands on show bring the A-game. There are no weak links and no phoned-in performance. Every band puts on an act of the weekend performance, it just depends on your preferences and tastes who actually tops your personnel lists. The variance in style and substance is astonishing. You can move in a hair’s breadth from the heartbreaking (Nordic Giants, Maybeshewill) to the bone breaking (Crepitation, Anaal Nathrakh). It is a beautifully curated and created journey within the many recesses of difficult and extreme music. We at ROCKFLESH watch it all and by the end, we are physical and mental wrecks. This is our truth…..

The strange masks worn by Laster make them look like they have beamed down directly from the upstairs Cantina bar. The music they produce is equally other-worldly. It exists on the verges of tune-fullness and revels in its own imperfection. There is melody, but it is subverted and deconstructed. They produce odd ditties that are childlike in their simplicity but also manage to be incredibly evocative. It is all weirdly compelling, and you find yourself drawn into their strange, slightly abstract world. Damnation excels in showcasing bands like this, who gleefully subvert the usual parameters of our musical world and it makes perfect sense that they get to open up the whole shebang.

Coffin Mulch play Death Metal with a shot of sludge. There is less urgency and hyper speed than you would expect. Instead, the riffs rain down in a slow and methodological manner. It's heavy and penetrating but it seems to be in no hurry to reach its end destination. Instead of Death Metal’s usual sheer edges, there is much more of a blurred aspect to their sound. All in all, a thoroughly interesting way to start the morning.

The moment of Damnation ‘23 comes very early on. But it's not actually musically related (even though there is most definitely music playing). The moment that will be tattooed to the back of our eyeballs forever is that film, during that set by Nordic Giants. "Last Breath” (which accompanies their performance of ‘Through A Lens Darkly) starts incongruously enough. Stereotyped rich people in a stereotyped country environment. Then it turns and becomes before your very eyes one of the most harrowing things you will ever witness. In a nutshell, the atmosphere fails, and four divers are left contemplating their fate as their oxygen tanks rundown. I have never seen an audience so gripped by essentially eight minutes of celluloid. The world stops and all that is important are the images flashing before our eyes.

Heartbreaking shorts aside, Nordic Giants are astonishing. They create towering cathedrals of ethereal sound. There may be just two of them, but they manage to build colossal but simultaneously highly intricate tapestries of sumptuous noise. The layers build and build, crescendoing out across the vast confines of the Pins and Knuckles stage. It is majestic, it is moving, and it sets the bar so high that this is probably not worth any of the other bands going on after. Going back to that film, it also highly emotionally affecting and as the set comes to an end with the climax of “Last Breath” there is a long stream of people stepping outside to "have a minute”.

Kurokuma may hail from just across the Pennines, but it feels like they are coming very much from the left field. This is psychedelic doom. There is a heavy exterior, but rather than slam our faces against the noise, they concoct an almost transcendental veil of sound that cohorts across the arena. It's heavy metal, but is also intricately fragile and filled to the brim with textures and cultural touchstones that feel distinctly alien to our rather meat and potato music. They bring out a revolving door of guest vocalists, each providing an additional unique ingredient to their melting pot of influences and identities. There is something absolutely wonderful about how disconnected they feel from any other musical form. Stunningly original and stupendously stirring.

Joe Mortimer of Crepitation is a legend. Having realised that his band’s debut Damnation slot clashed with his best mate's stag do in Dublin, he decided to do the rational thing which is to attend both. He receives a hero's welcome on the holy goat brewing stage having caught the twenty to eight flight that morning from the Irish capital. If some of the acts at Damnation can come across as a little serious and self-important, then Crepitation is where the non-self-conscious party is at. They are pure juvenile silliness from start to finish. Slam metal has no pretensions and is incredibly aware that it has the intellectual properties of a learning-disabled Slug. It is also the most fun you can have whilst throwing yourself around a mosh pit in a silly costume.

Having conquered the pit last year as Pikachu, Damnation legend Tom Lower this time seems to have placed himself inside a sealed inflatable chamber. He is tossed around like a beach ball and seems subject to the most violent game of catch ever played. Fun is very much the name of the game here and Crepitation provide 30 minutes of chaotic glee. There are synchronised dance moves, there are flailing bodies are plenty and the whole place turns into a psychedelic rave every time they blast out a bit of Gaba. And most importantly Joe got his flight back to Dublin.

Hailing from Denver, this is Khemmis’ first visit to this country. Over four albums they have honed a sound that splices pulverising doom with a much more traditional metal sound. The two blend well even if it does feel like you are tuning in and out of two radically different radio stations. The saving grace is just what good musicians Zac, Phil, Ben, and David are. What could have been, in other hands, a bit of a mess, instead feels gloriously expansive and brimming full of infinite possibilities. The solos are exquisite and there is a sumptuous elegance to the whole thing.

Damnation prides itself on riding the zeitgeist and the buzz around Ashenspire is deafening. A self-confessed anarchistic collective they mesh radical politics with an avant-garde interpretation of extreme metal. There is nothing here that can really be described as ordinary. They are aggressive storytellers, painting a picture of global subjugation and political neglect. There is not an inkling of escapism here, instead, they are dystopian troubadours telling the tales that our society has forgotten or mislaid.

Musically, the influences are all over the shop and we veer from free-form jazz to crust punk by way of another hundred subgenres. Their audio forms continually morph and reinvent itself during the set. No sooner have we landed at a recognisable style than we launch off into pastures lesser-known. What screams out though is the passion and the inevitability of the whole thing. Ashenspire are simultaneously driven and possessed. Like they have no choice than to make this noise because the stories they have, need to be told. Another inventively unique left turn in a day brim-full of them.

High command, with their retro-infused thrash, may well make far less musical U-turns thanAshenspire but they are no less dazzling and inspiring. It's so easy to make bad thrash that you forget how hard and musically adept it is to actually produce the good stuff. High commandjust keep unleashing uppercut after uppercut. Direct and minimal in its aesthetics, this is thrash with all the fat removed. Wholesome and utterly divine.

There was a point in time when it looked like Unearth could well inherit the earth. The stars were aligning and something was brewing deep in Massachusetts. Their Sophomore effort “The Oncoming Storm” united those who wanted their brutal aggression channelled through soaring melody. Something happened on the way to heaven and twenty years later Unearth are not the stadium botherers that they seemed destined to be. This is unashamedly nostalgia city as the rapidly expanding pit attracts everybody who either downloaded the album from LimeWire or traded mini discs in the college canteen. As the bodies fly and the lungs expand, you realise that, even though they never had the impact that they were expected to, this album means so much to so many.

Unearth play it with a straight bat. They realise the importance of this record to the throng spread out in front of them and they give it all they've got. It is an astonishingly charged and emotionally mature performance. Whilst all its tracks have been played at some point somewhere, this is the first time they done it in its entirety in its original order. You can see the pride in the band's eyes as the crowd gets off on songs that they have not wheeled out for a decade or so. It's a feast of passion and precision performance. We knew it was going to be good but this is frankly awesome.

The screen above OHHMS simply reads END. Paul Waller is at great pains to tell us that 10 years after accidentally becoming a band purely to sign to the then hip and trendy Holy Roar records, that they have accidentally decided not to be one any more. There is no drama and there are no tensions or noticeable disagreements. Instead, we have a calm and clear decision not to continue after the end of tonight's set. To mark the climax of a decade-long career we get a definitive march through their varied career. They may well have been categorised as a doom band, but there is so much more colour and diversity to their sound. The fact that they are heavy is unarguable, but that heaviness is nuanced and bathed in the beautiful texture. They give their all one more time and once Paul has seemingly thanked everybody who ever lived on this planet they are then no more.

Strigoi dwell in the dark recesses of the world. This is dark music for dark thoughts. It's the apex where black metal and Goth meet. Equally atmospheric and deeply disturbing, they cast a shimmering shroud of unnerving sound across the audience. This is essentially what Greg Mackintosh and Chris Casket did next after Damnation alumni Vallenfyre fell apart and they seem to have moved even further into the heart of darkness. Stirring and evocative, it's music to have nightmares to.

f we are honest, aside from the rapid fan boys and girls upfront, nobody is quite sure what to expect from Julie Christmas. She is venerated around these parts for the crucial role she played in the greatest Damnation set of all time (namely “Mariner” in full with the Cult of Luna in 2016) and there are those who rave about her previous outfits Made out of Babies and Battle of Mice, but aside from that the majority of us are in virgin territory. There are two initial surprises. The first is the involvement of Cult of Luna lead guitarist/growler Johannes Persson. He spends the entire set stood on the lip of the stage, marshalling out colossal riff after colossal riff. The second astounding conclusion is how darn heavy her performance is.

Those who are expecting twee fragility have to immediately do a second take. This is a full-on, full force aural attack. It is astonishingly virile and striking. It is a set absolutely chocker with kinetic power and vitriolic endeavour. Julie herself is an astonishing frontwoman. Shrouded in the main with billowing smoke, all we can make out is the string of lights that adorn her dress. Nevertheless, she absolutely burns off the stage with incendiary ferocity. She has flown across especially for this show and she seems hellbent on ensuring that it's one that we will remember forever. Emotional, passionate but also monumentally powerful she unleashes a tumultuous performance that frankly will give Mariner a run for its money as Damnation’s GOAT.

End of Part I. Part II to follow.

Check the “In The Flesh” page for more photos!
Julie, Christmas, Strigoi, OHMMS, Unearth, High Command, Ashenspire, Khemmis, Kurokuma, Crepitation, Nordic Giants, Coffin Mulch, Laster