Review: Howling Owl: New Year / New Noise 3

If mid-January is widely considered a bad time to put on a gig, New Year / New Noise 3 proves there’s much to be said for going against the grain. Organisers Howling Owl have been ambitious this time round, gambling on the success of previous efforts with a three day binge of events, but it’s paid off for them. Everything has sold out, and Saturday’s show is nothing short of a triumph.  

In the bar some men play records they’ve made out of copper, while the cinema screen warms up the auditorium with a showreel of music videos. The visual aspect has always been important to Howling Owl, whose owners Joe and Adrian are members of the art collective bulb, and the evening is stimulating to the eyes as well as the ears.

It takes Repo Man (above) less than half their opening song View The Overheads to build up to a frenzy of slashing guitar and freak-out sax, and they don’t let up from there. While the post-punk quartet look more at home in grimier venues (watching them in a pristine arts centre feels weirdly like watching them on television), they sound amazing through the punchy, high spec PA. Frontman Bojak is an unsettling composite of Jello Biafra and Charles Manson, and newly installed drummer Ollie swings like a hippopotamus on a high tensile gossamer thread. 

With no pause for a changeover, Chronoautz follow with loops of disgusting overdriven noise held vaguely together by techno beats. Once it settles into a groove it sounds like a lo-fi version of the free party acid played by Chris Liberator et al, albeit with a more chaotic sound palette and a massive strop on. An interval follows in which a twelve foot prawn stalks Arnolfini’s atrium, pursued by trudging penitents with plastic drums. The crustacean is later seen towering over the bar trying to order a pint of lager. 

Meanwhile the auditorium is re-arranged for performance in-the-round, which provides an atmospheric setting for the next two acts. Rhain is a fine singer whose mannered vocals recall Kate Bush and Joanna Newsom. While her wistful piano ballads are straightforward and a little samey, her distinctive voice makes her more interesting than your typical Bristol singer-songwriter, and her set is received well by the crowd. She may well get picked to be the ‘quirky’ act on a Jools Holland show of the future. 

Rhain is followed by Blood Music, whose powerful set encapsulates the struggle to survive and create in an increasingly hostile urban environment. “London is eating me alive” warns Simon Pomery as thick electronic drones reminiscent of Pan Sonic threaten to swallow everything within a five mile radius. If at first Pomery’s drumming seems to walk passively in step with the oppressive noise-groove, the last three tracks see him attacking the skins with expressive fury, like a man desperate to free himself from a rhythmic straitjacket. It’s intense, hair-raising stuff.

Spectres – two of whose number run Howling Owl – headline tonight and they’re incredible. While there are hints of everything from early Pink Floyd to Jesu and My Bloody Valentine, they don’t just update the noise-rock template so much as give it a whole new range of possibilities. The tone of their set is unrelentingly dark – a sonically ravishing horror trip of grinding guitar, head-wrecking electronics and mumbled, enervated vocals. 

Making excellent use of the cinema screen, the band play in front of scenes from their own promo videos – most memorably Where Flies Sleep’s Dali / Bunuel style image of a dead fly placed on quivering tongue. In terms of both sound and vision, Spectres’ production values are closer to those of an arena rock show than something you’d expect to hear in a DIY venue above a grass roots boozer. As abrasive as any cassette-only filth but as rendered as precisely as cutting edge electronica, on this evidence they’re an alternative band for our times. 

Photographs by James Hankins.