Reviewed on Saturday August 13
Remember that video your sad uncle shared on Facebook a few months ago – the one where the history of rock was compacted into a single seven minute song that snaked through genre after genre, band after band? That’s what Screaming Females sound like, except the genres they mash up do not come from this earth. Screaming Females play rock ‘n’ roll from distant planets untouched by humanity – rock’n’roll from fucking Venus – and they mix up tones you didn’t even know existed, let alone tones you thought couldn’t be mixed.
Hannahband opened the evening with a buckshot of pop, heaping up a collection of bone-brittle tunes into the centre of the stage, and though they spoke of nerves there was nothing nervous about their performance. Taking to the stage soon after, Mere Women offered up dripping hunks of song: hewing through their set, they played with an orchestrated lack of grace. Their singles are all carefully considered carnage, anchored by a Public Image Ltd.-esque sense of fractured rhythm and a mind to make people dance. Their finest track, ‘Heave Ho’, combines expertly assembled beauty and a singularly battered sensibility – it’s a post-rhinoplasty nose dragged up a sandstone wall.
Then, Screaming Females. Their set started fast, with little introduction, and only got faster. A decade of playing together has trimmed anything resembling fat off the trio’s set: the band were all sinew and bone. Even their moments of relative calm had a potency that could put a death metal band mid-riff to shame, and the hushed first half of ‘Hopeless’ was so shocking that some members of the crowd let out loud, involuntarily peals of nervous laughter.
It was artful disassembly, and guitarist and vocalist Marissa Paternoster picked apart songs and riffs with a singular skill and precision. Nobody plays guitar like Paternoster. I’m not even convinced she actually plays it – the word ‘play’ implies a talent that can be learnt, but I don’t think even hours of practice could have someone doing what Paternoster does to an instrument, or to a crowd.
The set didn’t finish as much as it snapped clean off. By the time it was all done, Paternoster was lying on the ground, screaming into the mic. A normal crowd would have pulled back – they were very close to Paternoster, standing over her, breaking the boundaries of the stage. But by that point they weren’t a normal crowd. They didn’t pull back. Instead they quietly moved forward and huddled around Paternoster, hands cupping around a flame, as one final, hoarse scream rang out.
