Burying Hamer

What the hammer? what the chain? / In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp / Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

And ... welcome to the psych-noise funhouse! Yes, dear friends, Romans ... lovers of Blake, here's a brief gig review of Hamer at Muthers Studio in Birmingham at the weekend.

Not a mess: Hamer's LP

As regular readers will know, Hamer are a band who've previously been known to prompt a grudging Niluccio on noise "Yeah, they're OK" response (high praise indeed). Hamer's thing is warp-speed psych-rock: thunderous drumming, fast bass playing, a singer-guitarist who shouts and gibbers into a wall of delay and sonic murk. At their best they sound (as I said a couple of years ago) a bit like the Damned doing Hawkind. If you ask me, this kind of music needn't necessarily be especially good. If it gets too sloppy or degenerates into some kind of undifferentiated thrash - then, yeah, it could be kinda boring. That's not how this gig was though. To start with, we had a bit of teasing - a slow-jam intro/prelude (quite pleasant, as it happens) before a halt, a short announcement and ... we were off. I can't really describe their music (check out their Bandcamp), but it's a hailstorm of pulsing, riff-heavy motorik noise (that's about the best I can do). It's not a mess though. You can sort of hear the structure within the cavernous sound, and here and there the skeleton jumps out at you - the drum riff in one of their songs (No One) is surely from The Damned's Neat Neat Neat (or am I imagining this?).

What the mutherfuck is going on? Hamer in Birmingham, 8/11/19

When I first saw Hamer a couple of years ago my expert musical take then was: "A high-intensity punkoid blast from a three-piece fronted by someone looking like a slightly-off-his-head rock dude who'd accidentally found himself in a punk band. Kinda great". Which ... I still stand by. (Yeah, I think I hit the nail on the head with Hamer there. Ahem). Meanwhile, as Hamer recede into the distance, blasting out yet more frantic riffs as they sail over the horizon, it's my duty to inform all Niluccio on noise readers that, unfortunately, it's very much the way of things that bands like Hamer will only be good for as long as people don't start writing stuff about er, how good they are. Yep, it's the over-appreciation paradox. As soon as any half-decent band start getting admiring press they're basically ... finished. It's could easily happen to Hamer. In fact, it probably will. And if they ever read this blog ... that will certainly be the end. Curtains. Finito. So, friends, Romans, countrymen / I come to bury Hamer, not to praise them. You all need to Turn Me Off.