There was a good turnout again for the first band, and the venue overall filled up steadily as the afternoon went on, with a few bands attracting a fuller house, and it was packed for the headliner.
Mountains – Acid Throne – Pyramid – Moon Coven
Words: Marisa Adams
Photography: Artur Tarczymil
Mountains
This London four-piece opened the second day’s proceedings with some beautiful rolling melodies and harmonies with folk or historical feel at times, weighted with huge, satisfying riffs, really great vocals, lyrics and storytelling and interesting arrangements on songs like Hiraeth from their most recent album Tides.
Early in the set, Pilgrim, also from Tides, was dedicated to a friend who had loved live music but died before his time. They had a great range, bringing melancholy, poignance and mountainous heaviness with openness and honesty and loads of positive energy, fun, heart and warmth.
Maybe it was the plaid shirts they wore, the steel-guitar vibe (just me maybe), or songs like Everglades from 2017’s Dust in the Glare. Still, this one definitely brought a flavour of Americana and a sense of being steeped in certain traditions of musical storytelling.
Having been enjoying their music during the run-up to this festival, I found it awesome to see them live, and I’ll be looking out for them in the future. A great, emphatic and welcoming start to the second day.
Acid Throne
I missed these at Desertfest due to The Devonshire Arms – where from outside, they were sounding good – being packed (and it is the end of a long day). So here you are, guys, and this time, I was a bit fresher!
The Norwich trio performed songs from their debut album, Kingdom’s Death, released in November 2023. It soundtracks the wretched, rotting aftermath of an apocalypse where even death is no longer a sanctuary.
To me, there is also defiance at the core, a refusal to relinquish the last flicker of humanity, hope, warmth, and comradeship in resistance to those forces of corrupted leadership attempting to stamp it out so that something of the best of us might survive and grow in the future.
Opening with purposeful intensity, the first song from the album they played was River (Bare My Bones), and the second song from the album. The mic effect they use came across really well live, haunting like an echoing through time, disembodied, somehow creating a cavity-like giant lung for the powerful side-by-side vocals of the guitarist and bassist.
These were carried by heavy, doomy blues with rolling drums, like the steady marching of a corpse chain gang who chanted each grim line with a down-turned whip at the end, a bitter rebuke. They continued through their set of blackened steel-edged stoner doom with monstrous, bleakly alluring riffs, harmonies and drum licks, and charred vocals like a storm of bone soot.
There were moments of mournfully ethereal, cinematic elegy and a wall of sound like a deluge of death-filled vistas elsewhere. And somewhere deep within the blighted landscape that all of this described, that flicker of warmth and colour, maybe in the soulful blues vibrato touches and varied effects.
This was a really impressive, interesting, deeply atmospheric sound with cinematic breadth and loads of skill, character and heart, which was also clearly appreciated by the ever-growing audience. A tight and powerful performance with a clean and somehow relaxed – but massive – intensity, and loads of groove, I’ll be looking out for them playing in future for sure.
Pyramid
This was a flamboyant, fuzzy, dreamy, complex and by the end frantic, heavy psychedelic journey from the German trio, which drew plenty of noisy approval from the crowd. Much of the music from their excellent latest album Beyond Borders of Time, which they mainly played tracks from.
It evoked such imagery as a gradual hypnotic flight towards some magnificent natural wonder from a great distance, its scale becoming clearer and its features perpetually resolving into ever-increasing fractal detail. Faster numbers are similarly rich in detail and evocative power.
This set, which began with Medicine Man from the above album, and finished with Reincarnation from their 2019 album Mind Maze, was a deeply, lavishly immersive journey along pathways of elfin melodies growing in beauty and complexity, an enveloping in heaviness of riffs, skilled flourishes and duets in a performance that was also playful and highly kinetic.
All sartorially fabulous to boot, the guitarist’s leggings were particularly magnificent, as was his personality, which extended out past the gloriously frenetic end to their set and into the audience where he could be seen throughout the rest of the day, spreading cheer and enjoying the other bands. I even got a kiss on the hand on the way out at the end of the night, can’t ask more than that.
Moon Coven
This foursome, opening with the heavy, pacey Wicked Words In Gold They Wrote from the latest album Sun King, brought some varied, doomily melodic, 70s psych fusion with virtuoso guitar moments, steady vocals and some really great rolling, hypnotic drums.
Ethereal melancholy passages, particularly in the deeply atmospheric Bahgsu Nag from 2021’s Slumber Wood, and the doomy Behold The Serpent, also from Sun King.
Waves of colour lapped at a weighty monolith of fuzzy riffs and grooves as spacey hooks swirled around the mysterious tales they wove, and there were some clearly huge fans among the appreciative audience.
