LIVE: Dressmaker & Terminal Gods @ Buffalo Bar, London
Alejandro De Luna
Review originally published for Gigslutz. Read the original text here
If you’ve never been to the Buffalo Bar, the place is a cramped venue with no distance between the stage and the audience. The combination of red and dark lights, along with the black leather obsessives, tattoos, Doc Martens and body piercings that visited the obscure basement in Highbury & Islington, gave the impression of being in some kind of community waiting to be disturbed by a funereal wave of sonorous anarchy.
Loud as fuck, disturbing and perversely beautiful; that´s the sound coming out of trashed amps when you listen to Dressmaker – one of London’s most satisfying experiences if you are looking for something to outrage your inner peace. Besides the perturbing sound full of gloom-like fuzz and sonic violence, Dressmaker is a cocktail of hopeless obscurity: punk-like aggression, heavy post-punk bass lines, vocals that claim for Ian Curtis’ throne, noise rock-like cacophonic guitars a la Sonic Youth and The Jesus & Mary Chain, and the howling beauty of industrial misery that despises digestible and joyful sounds.
They came up on stage with an unconventional approach that immediately grabs your attention: an outstanding drummer and full-time athlete that leads the hysteria, caused by barricades of noise between a bass and a guitar played at their loudest, while Charles Potashner – Dressmaker’s vocalist – waits off-stage before entering into his schizophrenic horror show full of screams and drama. Then, the band enters in some sort of catatonic and violent state and the result is a perplexing pandemonium, only comparable to twisted miserables like Xiu Xiu – an experience definitely not suitable for all those “Kasabians” out there.
If you listened to Dressmaker before in your cheap speakers, these Hackney-based perverts offer a highly superior proof on-stage. From ‘Glass’, a Sonic Youth-esque rendition; ‘The Future’ with its deafening drums and somber textures; their savage 7-minute long goth opera, ‘Skeleton Girl’; to one of the darkest versions you´ll ever listen of The Ronettes’ ‘Be My Baby’. Unfairly compared to The Horrors and A Place To Bury Strangers, Dressmaker is a highly superior pursuit of darkness and disruption of noise.
Tight and dark, but unlucky of headlining a show next to Dressmaker, Terminal Gods – a post-punk drum-machine oriented quartet that comfortably rests in the legacy of The Sisters Of Mercy – brings a more melodic experience in comparison to the previous fuzz obsessives, although not as perplexing as the previous ones. Not even their cover of ‘White Light/White Heat’ and a setlist full of garagesque reminiscences and dark ’80s paranoia were enough to put me out from the tinnitus caused by Dressmaker.
Remember Dressmaker and remember the drummer. This band is not your typical digestible picnic band. They are one of London’s hidden treasures, sitting in a dark legacy and waiting to destroy your inner peace. Just brilliant.
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