LIVE REVIEW: Helpless @ New Cross Inn, London

While much of the scene goes round in circles debating marginal gaps in quality between ultimately disappointing releases from some of our biggest arena-fillers, those with their eyes on the margins know where the real fun is to be had. Tonight, just a fraction under a tenner gets you into the hallowed New Cross Inn in London as metallic hardcore trio HELPLESS head up a five-band, bargain-price showcase of some of the UK underground’s best and bleakest.

First up are a group we’ve had a lot of nice things to say about this year. Noisy sludge metallers ROW OF ASHES have one of the best albums of the year in their back pocket with Bleaching Heat and they’ve been playing it more or less in full – albeit in varying orders – at every chance they get since its release back in May. Tonight is no exception, and while it’s a shame there aren’t more bodies in the room as they take to the stage, the trio have no trouble filling all the space available to them with swathes of monolithic sludge.

The band are most compelling when they deliver their biggest grooves, as found in the likes of Jerk, Worcester Man and the devastating set closer In Summation. If we go looking for criticism one could argue that some of the finer details are lost in the maelstrom, but with apocalyptic heft very much the name of the game here the overall takeaway remains that way more people need to wake up to this band before that opening riff from Jerk comes and knocks their houses down.

Rating: 8/10

Eager to take the evening to a whole different level of horrible are London deathcrust five-piece SEWER TRENCH, or as their vocalist Hadley Sharp puts it halfway through the set “the world’s leading stadium crust band who doesn’t play stadiums.” Sharp spends the entire set pacing menacingly in front of the stage, his vocals wholly unintelligible but still impressively varied and tortured as they sit atop what is largely a relentless wash of D-beats and blasts.

There isn’t loads to grab onto here as the band spend what feels like a good 95% of their stage time in the highest gear drummer Alex Monad can take them to. There’s a groovier riff here, a moody start there – even a pause for a beer order at one point – but other than that it’s all go and no-one can really complain when the quintet’s set runs a little over.

Rating: 7/10

With less than half the membership of their predecessors, Hertfordshire’s DEATH GOALS have no intention of being outdone in terms of chaos. They announce their arrival with a defiant cry of “queer hardcore forever” from drummer George Milner before ripping into a set that reminds us just how special last year’s The Horrible And The Miserable LP was.

The pair incite a significant increase in crowd commotion, with guitarist/vocalist Harry Bailey taking all of a minute to decide he’d rather be on the floor with the rest of us. He throws himself and his tools all over the place as the set progresses, with cuts like Misery and Helen Keller Is Teaching Me How To Talk To Boys promoting some chaotic scrambles for an increasingly elusive and battered microphone.

Much like one of their most obvious inspirations in THE CHARIOT, it all feels like it could fall apart at any minute, and to an extent it does as we soon lose nearly all of Bailey‘s vocals, while his guitar ends the set flying across the stage minus at least one string. And yet the whole thing is utterly captivating – this is chaotic hardcore at its finest, and with a brand new song in the setlist we can only hope that means the band’s Prosthetic Records debut is on the not-too-distant horizon.

Rating: 9/10

With the crowd well and truly riled up, Peterborough grindsters RAZOREATER have no trouble keeping things that way. These guys are as tight as anything and they manage to fit all seven tracks from last year’s killer Purgatory EP, plus three from its 2016 predecessor Vacuum Of Nihil, into a set that barely tops 20 minutes.

Frontman Mors is inescapably captivating, beating and banging his head like a maniac as he pours vocal bile all over a bed of razor sharp riffs and blast beats. We do get a few moshier parts here and there too, and penultimate track Bloodeagled hits particularly thunderous heights before closer There Is No More Hope ends the set with the kind of blistering flurry that most clearly defines the band’s M.O.

Rating: 8/10

In many ways, HELPLESS are the perfect band to bring the varied elements of this bill together. The South West trio’s sound delivers on shades of all the sludge, noise, crust, grind and chaotic hardcore that we’ve heard this evening, with all this and more distilled into a sound so gigantic and ferocious that only the human eye can confirm it really is coming from just three people.

Opening their set with the piercing noise and hulking stomp of Denied Sale from 2017’s Debt, we’re soon treated to a wealth of cuts from this year’s arguably even better Caged In Gold. Tracks like Wraiths Of Memory, The Empty Gesture and Focus Group Extraction are all delivered with utmost precision and venom, with the band’s triple vocal attack – sometimes traded off, sometimes delivered in unison – marking perhaps the sharpest tool in their arsenal.

Even the more atmospheric songs from the record sound great, especially a track like Single File which takes on even more devastatingly deathy power in the live setting. Closing their set as they do the album with the gargantuan The Great Silence, this one wraps up an evening that proves five times over that you don’t need £60 and an arena full of pyro to have a great time in extreme music here in the UK.

Rating: 9/10

Check out our photo gallery of the night’s action in London from Anne Pfalzgraf here:

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