Father, Son, and Phone-In Host

Here's a review from the latest Nightshift.  It was a good gig, but I fear that the Hallowe'en theme behind the review is a bit hack.

GODCASTER/ LIFTS/ LEE RILEY, Divine Schism, Port Mahon, 31/10/23 

It’s Hallowe’en, and Lee Riley’s guitar lies on its back on the darkened stage. If it resembles a corpse, then like Bela Lugosi’s Dracula projected onto the ceiling above the stage, it is not one that rests easy. Using bows, bludgeons, and just possibly a vibrator, Riley the necromancer invokes clouds of sound that seem to haunt, rather than fill, the room. There are soft misty tones that evaporate when you try to focus on them, there are dense thickets of sonic furze at the bottom end, and, fittingly, the ear-scouring screams of the damned courtesy of a bowed scrap of metal.  

If Hallowe’en is a night for encountering the strange, then Dublin’s Lifts deliver by placing a violin and viola centre stage at the Port. Their opening number pairs these with pounded piano and some repetitive Glassy sax to create a blasted cabaret tune like a zombie Jacques Brel fronting Dirty Three. If none of the rest of the set quite hits that height again, their sawing, soaring crescendos and intricate drum tattoos make them A Chamber Mt. Zion. Only the vocal, which tends towards a ruptured pirate growl, occasionally mars the effect. 

If NYC sextet Godcaster were to make a horror film, it would be the colour-saturated camp of Hammer or Amicus, and judging by the frontman’s stomps and pirouettes, it would be about a rock vocalist possessed by the revenant spirit of a cursed flamenco dancer. These preening theatrics are lightly amusing, but the band don’t need them, the music is easily engrossing enough. The set careens between spiky blasts of noise slashed with awkwardly tricksy guitar, and the breathy, diaphanous ‘Pluto Shoots His Gaze Into The Sun’, which is half hippy campfire meandering, half Broadway ballad. But they’re at their peak when they stretch out over hypnotic Holger Czukay basslines, and the penultimate number powers along like a Kraut reworking of Floyd’s ‘Astronomy Domine’ powered by Dr Frankenstein’s harnessed lightning. It’s a thrilling experience, and we hope there’ll be an even more garish sequel.