Gallows
Auntie Annies, Belfast
As the kids get testy, a hapless bouncer scurries over to divide the dangerously out-of-control mosh-pit from snarling carrot-top leadsinger Frank Carter. The crowd surge forward. Someone loses an eye.
As Carter gets to work with the deeply menacing ‘Just Because You Sleep Next To Me Doesn’t Mean You Are Safe’ it feels like Year Zero, the stroke of midnight, 1976 and shit is about to go down. Screaming of the lost and the dead of British youth Gallows are a toxic evacuation of a set-up, we have only to take the medicine.
Through ‘Abandonship’, ‘Rolling With The Punches’, ‘Kill The Rhythm’ and ‘Stay Cold’ the band are nothing short of world-ending and it is tangable. Carter is the real deal - the smell of grassroots lawlessness and bitter disillusionment dripping from him. Gallows operate beyond the marketable, the pleasant, the unthreatening and it’s empowering.
They close with two of the most combustible punk songs to come out of Britian in over a decade. ‘In The Belly Of A Shark’ is a nasty slice of revenge-fantasy punk that describes “when you really hate a girl and you start goin out with her again just to fuck her up�. ‘Orchestra Of Wolves’ ends the set with four minutes of macabre, vinegar-soaked violence. Something ugly and rotten has being growing right under our noses. Gallows will kill us all to save us. Let them.
Words_John Calvert
I Heart AU | Design by goodonpaper.org | AU is supported by Lottery funding
