Amenra
20th November 2018
Whammy! Bar, Auckland, New Zealand.
Review by Cameron Miller. Photography by Sarah Kidd.
As a novel is long form fiction, believe it or not there is such a thing as long-form metal. Some metal bands want nothing more from their songs than to smash you in the face with a brick and be out the door before you can spit your teeth out. The Hemingway approach – simple gut punch impact. Grindcore Demos, For Sale, Never Signed. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have Amenra and the other bands that plied their trade at Whammy Bar last night. These are the tome-droppers of the metal world, driven by ambition to achieve something epic in scope and profound in implication. Length isn’t an inherent good, of course. Every masturbatory prog solo isn’t the next Shine on You Crazy Diamond, any more than every 1000-page intellectual self-indulgence is the next War and Peace. Give the right songwriter the time they need, though, and they can craft you something that builds upon its themes, that weaves together its separate elements, and that builds to a crescendo that will grip you like a cliff hanger. Last night was a night for the metal musician as storyteller.
I’d seen Wellington’s Into Orbit play once before, and I was excited to catch them again. I wasn’t the only one, as Whammy showed off a damned decent turnout for an opening act. With just drums and guitar, Ian Moir and Paul Stewart create lavish, wide ranging instrumental post-metal journeys. They played without a word to the crowd, which would turn out to be a trend, and left no pauses for applause between songs. The impression was they wanted the audience enraptured rather than rapturous, and enraptured we were. The music was impressively dynamic, moving organically from fast to slow, loud to quiet, build to crescendo. The subtler joy was in the dialogue between the two, as Stewart reached out a melody like an inviting hand to be picked up and cradled by Moir’s groove, or Moir intruded on a wall of distortion with a demanding, orderly beat. This give and take extended to knowing which sections should let which player shine. Big, simple riffs allowed for bombastic drum rolls and fills, and a steady rhythm supported guitar solos that were prog-tinged without losing intimacy. A class act.
Australian guests YLVA stamped their mark on the Whammy stage before even playing, with a staggered lighting arrangement of vertical fluorescent tubes that gave the small stage a sense of depth and dimension. They then blasted away that aesthetic enjoyment with an opening barrage so loud and heavy it shocked my ears even through my earplugs. The sludgey post metal style had strong shades of Neurosis, while still sounding its own brand of harsh, ugly and desperate. While Into Orbit allowed themselves to soar, the few soft melodies that emerged from YLVA sounded like they’d dragged themselves from a tar pit, tainted and gasping for air. The brutally precise blows of drums and downtuned chords during “Metadata” and “Lapse” had heads banging, but “The Fall” was the grand centrepiece. Thirteen minutes of slow build, note by sparse note, turning the screws of tension with excruciating patience. Experience has taught me to expect an eventual crescendo to these kinds of arrangements, a cathartic big boom. Here it comes, I thought with every new scraping note or snare hit added to the mix. Surely now, when Mike Deslandes returned to his jagged edged howl. It never quite came. The audacity! To trap your audience in such a dreadfully hypnotic cycle, and just leave them there right as the intensity was peaking. Sublime. After one more ferocious, meticulous cut, YLVA left us abruptly, feeling like they’d been there both forever and no time at all.
Amenra’s set began in the dark, to the ominous sound of rhythmic clinking that opens “Boden.” The lonely sound echoed throughout Whammy at first, but gradually it was crept up on by twin guitar melodies growing ever more distorted, before being completely swallowed by a monstrous riff. This was to be fittingly prescient of Amenra’s set. They play their Doom metal less straight than other bands, mixing in elements of hardcore punk and post-metal. Yet their performance felt like Doom itself, some implacable, inevitable, and terrible fate bearing down on you. You can mourn, rail against it, cry out in anguish. Still it comes. This is starting to read like cut-rate Lovecraftian homage, but bringing that out of me speaks to how powerfully evocative Amenra’s live experience was. This atmosphere was aided greatly by Colin Van Eeckhout’s despairing, cut-glass shrieks.
The band played as a cohesive unit, no one member standing out to me as all involved simply contributed their part to the whole. The arrangements were ingenious, favouring a format where a central hook is built to, introduced, moved away from, then built back towards. Hearing the fragments and finger picked reprises of riffs, then hearing them explode back into being, had the same narrative satisfaction of watching Chekov’s gun blow a dirty great hole in something. As artsy as the style was, these were some headbanging riffs.
As the show went on the already serious tone took on deliberate elements of religious ritual. Van Eeckhout took to kneeling in supplication between songs, shirtless back to the audience. There is no doubt the audience was feeling something very real. I saw one member crying, and once another punter was compelled to burst into a gap in the front row and flail amongst the headbangers like a whirling dervish.
Whatever the music meant to Amenra, they left it to interpretation, playing their piece and leaving silently, no need for a postscript. No notes in the margins from me, either. My only regret is that unlike a novel I can’t fold up Amenra’s live show and lend it around to show off my good taste.
Were you there at Whammy! Bar for this superb metal gig? Or have you seen Amenra live somewhere else before? Tell us about it in the comments below!
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