On the third night of the LLNN headline tour, The Dome in London saw Copenhagen’s ultra-heavy space farers on their only UK date. They were joined by loosely defined post-sludge/doom outfit Sugar Horse from Bristol in their first outing of the tour.
LLNN – Sugar Horse
Downstairs at The Dome, London – 3 February 2024
Words: Marisa Adams
The venue was sold out and full right from the start. Tickets were bought well ahead of time as there was no way this one would be missed. This was a truly standout gig, not only for the music but also for the reception and crowd energy for both bands.
LLNN
Opening with the eerie pulsating and utterly mesmerising demonic chanting of The Horror, creepily inexorable menace built until the band, now reunited on stage, launched a pulverizingly brutal edifice of pummelling sound into outer space.
Within moments, a fountain of beer at the edge of an instantaneous pit signalled the crowd’s unequivocally enthusiastic response to this onslaught and set the tone for a set punctuated by a forest of pumping fists, syncopated crowd surfing and bellowing audience participation.
Ominously crushing, no mercy whatsoever was shown as the audience was ruthlessly mown down and then bionically melded with a gargantuan sonic train plunging relentlessly through a nightmare future.
The total commitment of all band members to absolutely unrestrained deployment of each monstrous bone atomising detonation, sinister void, tortured vocal, and apocalyptic cinematic vista made for a completely engulfing and utterly electrifying odyssey into a realm of baleful immensity.
Closing track Obsidian tore off the roof and fired it at the supermassive black hole in the centre of the galaxy, as guitarist/vocalist Victor Kaas crowd surfed to the back of the crispy ruins of Downstairs at The Dome.
The aftermath, stunned submersion in the euphoric glow of cooling magma, lasted for several days.
Sugar Horse
This opening set was one of light through maelstroms of shade over a vast landscape scoured by Channelled Scablands-era natural processes.
It embarked in calm waters until the first gigantic riff of Slam Dancing In A Burning Building arrived and transported those present, united in assent, with the ponderous inevitability of a colossal waterfall.
Passages of ethereal melody and swirling colour emerged throughout. Open, potent vocals and clean riffs spread wings over eddies of giddying expanse, to be engulfed again by behemothic thunderheads and gathering tumults carrying all in their path and laying mountains in accretion.
A stentorian storm of abrading vocals tore through these new landforms with flesh-shredding elemental force, ejecting eccentric life forms and the remains of long-forgotten rituals interspersed with artefacts of the Anthropocene. Night terror Sleep Paralysis Demon lay at the centre of all of this like a basilisk in its lair, exuding a rasping malevolence.
In closing, the nearly 18min Truth or Consequences, New Mexico began like a powerfully resonant call from the throat of prehistory, trailing millennia of arcana.
Its paradoxes, contrasts and weightiness gathered around the audience in a hypnotically satisfying landslide, a re-settling of disordered matter, fossilising us in a stratified monolith until we were blasted out of it by what then ensued.
Sugar Horse – Setlist
- Slam Dancing in a Burning Building
- Waterloo Teeth
- Sleep Paralysis Demon
- Shouting Judas at Bob Dylan
- Truth or Consequences, New Mexico
LLNN – Setlist
- The Horror
- Imperial
- Despots
- Desecrator
- Scion
- Parallels
- Interloper
- Monolith
- Division
- Obsidian
