Music / Reviews
Review: Antimatter, Exchange
“Does anyone out there still have any of our cassettes?” asks Rich Harding, somewhat optimistically. Yep, ’80s Bristol live scene staples the Allnight Chemists are playing their first gig in 26 years. Inevitably, they’re a little rusty and some aspects of the quartet’s music are very much of their time, notably the self-styled “inexplicable reggae song” that owes an actionably large debt to Here and Now. The awful throwaway Three Dogs also stands out in their set like a large, steaming, freshly-minted pile of canine poop, prompting a certain amount of embarrassed shuffling of feet out here in audienceland. But enjoyable proggy epics like Stranger in a Strange Land and Human Condition should fare much better in today’s more receptive musical climate than they ever did back in the final decades of the last millennium. As a special treat, they’ve also worked up a cover of the late Bob Calvert’s The Right Stuff. Rather than taking the obvious Monster Magnet heavy riffing approach, the Chemists apply a lysergic makeover with lashings of additional guitar and keyboards. Welcome back, fellas.
Like many acts on the lower rungs of the prog ladder, Liverpool’s Antimatter play to a modest, ferociously dedicated audience. To outsiders and the uncommitted, this can occasionally feel like stumbling into a private meeting of a religious cult. Fortunately, despite his relentlessly downbeat lyrics, founder Mick Moss proves a welcoming, positively cheery chappie. He co-founded the band with Duncan Patterson, formerly of the conspicuously more successful Anathema, but now distances himself from the connection with these fellow Scousers. That seems a little odd, as their melancholic prog clearly has what our evolutionary biologist chums would describe as a common ancestor. In particular, they share the technique of building euphoric waves of sound like a kind of prog bolero.
Much programming is necessary to pull this off live, but the secret weapon here is guitarist Dave Hall, who proves quite a wizard on the EBow. There’s always a danger of this stuff becoming monotonous, but Moss breaks it up beautifully with the unadorned Over Your Shoulder. Antimatter’s cover of Pink Floyd’s Welcome to the Machine amplifies its sense of menace, retaining only the mechanical throb of the original. Lengthy encore Stillborn Empires then takes a slight detour into symphonic metal territory. But just when you fear Moss’s angry relationship breakdown lyrics are about to leave a bitter aftertaste, he smirks unexpectedly and invites us all to stay behind to listen to some Kiss records.
is needed now More than ever
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