Summer festival season must be around the corner because the StrangeForms festival is here! Every year, Stewart and Kerry Ramsay bang their inaugural gong that declares that it’s time to start thinking about field-related activities and the forthcoming musical delights, friendships, and all-around positivity of festival season has officially begun. Every year, Bad Owl Presents curates two days of the very best of the more leftfield side of music with their perfectly formed festival at Leeds Brudenell Social Club, and this year is no different, with a wide range of music available. It’s no wonder punters refer to StrangeForms as the mini ArcTanGent. The faithful horde are here, festival buddies reunited, and broad smiles are on everyone’s faces.
The first band are stoked to be here too, Birdwitch don’t let it show on stage where their excellent take on the most frostbitten blackgaze is greeted with open arms by the StrangeForms family. The highly impressive banshee vocal styles of singer Raya-Mhari bring to mind the fabulous Witch Club Satan, whilst her soulful cleans are still blessed with enough menace to let you know that they could invoke the spirit at will. Already, we have a band that could follow in Cwfen’s footsteps last year, who blew up shortly after playing StrangeForms.
Next L.O.E. turn everything wide-screen and technicoloured with their soaring, emotive style of post-rock. The band employ video screens at the sides of the stage to lift the visual atmosphere into mini Nordic Giants territory; they’ve got a few more expensive bells and whistles to acquire before they can go as full on as them. With a grand sense of the cinematic and enough musical chops to pull off their ambitions, I definitely wouldn’t bet against this band to be future post-rock titans.
UK noise rock warriors As Living Arrows have sadly been through a line-up shuffle recently, with their incredible frontman Tom amicably stepping down from the band and bassist Pete stepping forward to fill the unenviable hole left by Tom’s departure. Luckily, Pete knows these songs inside out and steps up to the plate beautifully, giving every ounce of his soul to their songs. It’s another totally raw and soulfully noisy set from the band, and the enthusiastic cheers and applause reaction from the packed crowd speaks volumes. We’re looking forward to hearing what Pete can do with the band’s new material as he steps out front and centre of one of the most underrated acts in the UK, and hopefully, they’ll receive all the flowers they deserve. Following an impassioned performance like that is no mean feat, but there’s none of that mindset necessary, as StrangeForms’ expert curation ensures the bill’s variety means no one is actually following anybody.
Every act has their own sound, and Forlorn are coming from a completely different place. The pagan metal crew bring devastating heavyweight riffs and deathly roars alongside an unsettling feeling that they might have assembled a Wicker Man in the Brudenell carpark, and they’ve chosen you to get in it. The Church Road Records crew don’t sign metal bands that are anything less than the best that the UK has to offer, and on the strength of today’s hard as nails but disturbingly beautiful performance, they’ve hit it right once again. The running theme today seems to be bands with huge potential to level up within the next 12 months. Saying that this has been the case for all of the previous line-ups we’ve seen here. Next, we have a band we first witnessed at StrangeForms in 2023, who have gone from strength to strength ever since.
Cork’s finest blackened math rock disco dancers, God Alone. This band can’t do bad gigs; it’s actually impossible. Something intrinsic in their DNA means they kick ass 100% of the time. It’s actually got to the point where we are envious of people getting hit by this truly one-off band for the first time. We see these lucky speechless punters outside later picking their jaws off the floor. Today God Alone simply slays with their blast beats, mingling with their Kung Fu skills and dancefloor-destroying chaos, and the Brudenell throws shapes and bangs their head in response. It’s not all head scratching complexity, though. When the band launches into the effervescent Pink Himalayan, they infuse their technicality with the purest form of indie-pop hookiness, like it’s no big deal. Utter genius seems like too obvious a statement for this band.
Those new audience members are probably thinking that they can’t have their minds blown by anything else after that performance, but they are wrong. Another member of the StrangeForms class of 2023 is back. One man electronica explosion and pretty much the best drummer operating currently in the UK, Colossal Squid, is in the house! We look around the room for people who aren’t excitedly grinning yet and are probably wondering why there’s only a drum kit onstage. Within seconds of his performance, those stunned faces tell us that they are witnessing something utterly new to them, and a few seconds later, they are grinning and equally wide-eyed. Historically speaking, one-man drummer-focused acts and percussion-led music projects haven’t had the best reputation. However, Colossal Squid only has his instrument of choice in common with other drummers. His heavily augmented drum kit features a vast array of hidden triggers and pads that link him to every other element of his warped electronic hyper blast, meaning that he is triggering all of the synths and bassline as part of the beats. If we are honest, mere words simply don’t do this man’s incredible performance any justice. You really have to witness this show when he tours next year, utterly unmissable!
Fresh from touring Europe with The Callous Daoboys, UK hardcore rap, skank juggernaut Knives hit the stage with only one aim in mind, it seems, total annihilation of the Brudenell Social Club. There’s a lot of buzz around Knives currently, and it’s easy to see why as they bounce through metric tonnes of bludgeoning grooves and the most two-step-ready selection of tracks from their breakthrough Glitter album and attention-grabbing EPs. It’s a huge injection of fun into proceedings and a chance to enjoy a bunch of bangers in 4/4 time for a change of pace.
Meryl Streek appears alone tonight without his live drummer, and we are fully on board with the idea as it allows his set the intimacy that it demands. Meryl Streek is uncompromisingly direct in his delivery to the point where you feel like he’s talking to you personally. Tracks like Counting Sheep hit so deeply in our hearts and minds, meaning that Meryl Streek’s rage, frustration and sharp observations make everything else drift out of focus in the best way possible. His honest, frequently bleak subject matter is so unique that it’s obviously not for listeners with anything less than an open mind and a general social conscience. As equally at home here and at the likes of Rebellion Festival and Damnation Festival, Meryl Streek is one of the only artists we can think of who can reach such a wide audience with this amount of raw authenticity and conviction. Part punk rocker, part poet and a total one off. On the first of two days of musical innovation, Meryl Streek is the perfect choice of headliner in our minds.
Day 2
Sunday kicks off with the Bristol/Leeds hyperpop metal of The Sound Of Modesty. This band are way more interesting than the vast majority of formulaic Metalcore acts currently playing the exact same song out there, and their recent EP A Thousand Dreams is definitely worth your ears if not only for the fantastic No Face, a track that, by rights, should be huge by now. If you’re a fan of metal with fantastic vocal talent that transcends the genre norms, go and discover Sound Of Modesty.
Next up is everyone’s favourite Bristol-based noise rock band PEACH, who are riding in on the back of their latest awesome album, Only Love and what a cracking collection it is. Sometimes we forget that not everyone has seen the PEACH live experience as many times as we have been lucky to yet. The band easily chalked up another winning performance and judging by the surprised chatter outside after their set, Ellie’s truly wonderful, creative vocal style has just amazed a whole new set of converts to their angular noisy cause.
Next up, Tayne does the old switcheroo on their time slot with the held-up Cowboyy. Frankly, this matters not one bit, as the band completely owned the Brudenell today. Having not seen this band live yet, we were immediately bowled over by how goddamned heavy they are in the flesh, with Sam Barnes joining them on drums on loan from Brighton’s fakeyourdeath. His pounding rhythms bolster the already dense sound of Tayne and take their sonic assault into new realms of intensity. They barrel through prime cuts from their marvellous LOVE album, with equal parts metal, rave and psychedelia, all mashed up beautifully into one mind-blowing set. Believe what they say, Tayne is the shit, quite honestly.
Cowboyy now present, correct and next to play. They showcase a mathy take on heavily effected guitar-focused bops. They’re pretty enjoyable to watch, though we felt they could use a bit more light and shade in their songwriting, as it got a bit repetitive for us. However, the audience enjoyed themselves, and at the end of the day, who can argue with that?
The biggest surprise of the day for us was discovering a complete gem in the form of Shaking Hand. This youthful plucky (and they really do actually pluck a lot) band of highly talented musicians were simply stunning today. Shaking Hand play beautiful, delicate, melodic songs with wonderful echoes of the golden age of pre-grunge US alt-rock. This is especially impressive as the cult albums, bands like Slint, the songs and time period they remind us of came and went decades before they were born, and we aren’t exactly talking about mainstream music. We talked briefly to bad member George after their set, and apparently, this isn’t something they do consciously, although people have pointed it out before. Is it possible to unconsciously channel the spirits of long-gone bands decades later? After watching Shaking Hand, we actually think it is!
Nobody pushes the quiet/loud dynamic to its extremes quite like our favourite UK noisy crew, Sugar Horse. Today, the band are in total devastation mode, maybe it’s because this is the last date of their tour, maybe it’s because of the PA rig in the Brudenell being in the hands of their touring sound engineer, Unity Audio and Backline, but they have never sounded this good live before from a purely audio perspective. Their dense slabs of discordant down-tuned guitar push their poor equipment to the very limits of fracture, then…they disappear to a whisper and the sound of a pin dropping somewhere. Then, BANG! They are back into another gargantuan groove. However, it’s not just their heavy side that’s incredible; in frontman Ash, I feel like a broken record when I extol the virtues of his singing voice. He delivers so much soul, integrity and honesty in his delivery that it gives us goosebumps every single time and recent tracks like the incredible Fire Graphics and Ex Human Shield with its juxtaposing brutalist blocks of agonising screams and hands in the air blissful refrain. Put simply, Sugar Horse is a band we’ve been yelling about since we first came into contact with their music back in 2022, and we’ll keep yelling about them for the rest of time if we have to. Check out Sugar Horse today if you haven’t already.
We’d feel bad for any band that had to follow Sugar Horse today, as they’d better be another, just as brilliant, underrated noise rock leaning band with a knack for both melody and brutality… what’s that? Oh, Kowloon Walled City, all the way from America, is next!? The geniuses up at the Bad Owl labs must have taken this exact moment in the day’s programming into consideration and made all of the correct calculations, crunched the numbers, and, after meticulously scouring the planet, found the actual perfect band for this task. To describe the sound of Kowloon Walled City, we’d say that to our ears, imagine Helmet jamming Neurosis with a twang of Americana. Their twin guitars complement each other beautifully and tonally with a robust double humbucker sound for density counterpointed by a slimmer single coil pickup guitar layered on top. This gives their sound an awesome width, allowing their rock-solid foundational rhythm section the space to hammer home their point. This is basically a fancy way of saying that the band sounds huge. So huge and overwhelming in fact that at one point we actually involuntarily closed our eyes and totally zoned out in the moment, this wasn’t a conscious decision but rather a compulsion to immerse ourselves in this incredible and unexpected gift of a performance. We have to admit that at the start of this set, we knew very little about this band, and for that, we now hang our heads in shame and have gone away to binge their immaculate discography. It seems that we weren’t on our own and judging by the scramble for their merch that followed, many others now also have another band to obsess over when they get home. In the wake of those two huge shocks to the system, the only ways to go are either up into even noisier territory or chill the whole vibe down and bring the audience back to more earthly matters.
Minimalist goth rock two-piece Darkher brings us the latter option with a set that feels like the aftermath of the weekend. They’re almost like a beautifully dark Sunday sermon to send us on our way, and at this point, exactly the correct balm for our banging heads and creaking necks. To go from the last two bands’ room-filling walls of sound to a place that’s more intimate and personal for a final Sunday headline spot is a very StrangeForms move, and it’s this type of swerve that is the beauty of this incredible weekend every single year.
StrangeForms 2027 has been confirmed, and their ticket prices remain at a measly £37 for some of the very best forward-thinking music around. Many times, over the weekend, we’ve heard people stunned at how Stewart and Kerry manage to keep their ticket prices so low when much smaller promoters are charging way more for a lot less. The answer is simple: Bad Owl Presents make all of this happen because, just like you, they’re lovers of music and they want to see their favourite bands along with their beloved community.
Another perfect weekend.
Review By George Miller – https://www.facebook.com/oneflamemedia
Photos By: Thomas Hazlehurst – https://www.instagram.com/tommytogtog/
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