Ufomammut/Usnea at Bordeline, London - live review

The queue snakes past Soho’s Bacchanalian bolthole, the Crobar, and unsavouries proffer illicit goods to the punters. It’s a fittingly grimy start to a night that promises petrifying doom for a crowd ready to have their eardrums and solar plexuses shredded. The Borderline’s new sound system handles the dense reverberating tirade of Oregon’s USNEA [8]. Their mash of Amenra and Pallbearer is a haunting, murky slow drag of effects-laden black/death doom climaxing in a 15-minute closer of desperate explosives and rhythmic dirge. It’s a perfect opener for UFOMAMMUT [8], the mammoths from space (terrestrial base: Italy). Takes from new album 8 sound immense, like an electromagnetic tornado sucking up grit and spitting it out. The three-piece splinter trance-like space doom and wind-tunnel vocals with bulldozing bluesy sludge and hellish feedback, taking the mind off to corners of the universe unknown. As it should be, the show is more than a gig, it’s an experience.