Broadcast, Glasgow
Saturday 18th November, 2023
Glasgow’s Broadcast was home to a Weekend concert by the New York Band ‘Lip Critic’ who are enjoying a larger than life tour this year that will take them to Europe, they give it all at every gig. After forming in 2018 and releasing a few E.P’s one of which they called ‘Kill Lip Critic’ (an ironic title that sets a scene) they’ve released their debut album in 2020 called ‘Lip Critic II’ they’ve shaved their heads and have embarked on a rampage of noise.
I absolutely loved the support bands’ 40 min efforts, they go under the title ‘Engine of Ruin’. So much that I’ll be going to their own gig early next year in the Hairdressers down Renfield Lane, all I can say about them now is that they are a duo who sound like a five piece. This eve’s music had words like ‘War Metal’ and ‘Bestial Black Metal’ bandying about and it was of a genre I hadn’t listened to in a while.
The Punk energy and Attitude rolling from the very hips of ‘Lip Critic’ seemed to be double jointed with the heavy techno like business of creative sounds of the two samplers, that did nothing to halt the vocal screaming and the gesticulation’s of the powerfully charged vocal master from New York. I’m not sure why but the room was less than half full as he paraded through us, crawling as a demon and simultaneously calling us to the weapons of joy, taunting and childlike with no less than two booming drums.
Yes two booming drums, each of whose expressions were comically in pain and ecstasy. It came across with throbbing beats that sent yearnings that to a larger crowd could have meant a very serious, out of control fun party to gobble up the goblins and fire up the weapons furnace (so to speak). But their tweaks are quite interesting, Black Metal (and what not) that grew during the 80’s and 90’s out of some very negative strains often lent lyrics about inner pain, bloodshed and offered anger at the system.
Their live events were far from a downer though, instead it boomed on the electric guitars and had the crowds in waves like an AC/DC concert. Now all these decades later it seems to have moved from that far plain to vocals that instead are created by this sampling of electric music. Lip Critic are what you get when you mix metal with techno, quite the fete, and you get the vivacious punk that were the sounds we heard last night.
So for the crowd it was like a new double whammy where you can pick and choose which you’d like to celebrate while remaining true to the original codes that back then worked so well. But either way it was loud piled on top of loud, with a kind of rap style influenced vocal technique and that more than aggressive attitude it also used to have.
So much happened in a gig that was no more than 50 min long, vocals and collaborations set to invite the room to a state of near implosion, and attacked a sheer need to explode with everything remaining remarkably somehow intact. It may come that this reworking of heavy metal past may be spreading again through a youth who are still willing to mosh nights away and just connect through what seems like rage but may actually just be a desire for union in a world of uncertainty they set on fire with music.
Daniel Donnelly
Mumble Music 