Craven Idol, Helgi’s, Hackney, 30th June 2023 – Hexenbrenner haven’t made it, they were coming from the Black Country, no word as to why they haven’t made it, Craven Idol are now the only band on the bill and entry to the rather intimate back room is now free, Apparently the tardis-like very black back space officially holds ninety, is it me or, even though the place is packed, is it way too comfortable in here? Is that air conditioning? Metal has got way too cosy. Shouldn’t this be a sauna of a sweat pit? Shouldn’t we be drenched and over heating in here, this is way too nice! The back room is an atmosphere space though, black walls, black everything beside the low key red and purple lighting. Black amps, black t-shirts, black thrash flavoured extreme metal, none more black…

“We’re Craven Idol from North London” growls yer man, way out of the comfort zone of their home ground tonight then! All the way over here in deepest E8, one stop from that portal to hell or maybe that much needed new coffee shop. Things are of course as intense as you’d expect them to be from the off, that stew of old school extreme thrashing speeding black freight-train-in-a-tunnel-get-out-of-the-way metal. You are kind of fighting for a bit of clarity, it is pretty much a high speed wall of intense noise, somewhere in there there are tunes are trying to break through as screaming riffs pile up on top of pounding drums and dark dark baselines. It is gloriously relentless, gut churning rather than violent, it is more about the intense feeling, the power, the challenge laid down, the pure thrill of the relentless waves of it all in here in this tiny black bunker of a venue. It isn’t that they’re playing it stupidly loud, Craven Idol are too good for that, too good to be just about noise and confrontation, but it is kind of hard to work out which of their excellent pieces they’re actually performing at any given time. I assume it is mostly material from the impressively good Forked Tongue album, the long-standing band’s most recent piece of work, an album that’s alive with colourful detail, clever colour, dark aggressive colour, colour that is kind of lost here tonight. Colour lost in here in the beautifully intense maelstrom, in the whirlpools of noise, in the pounding and the riffs and the growling screams and death booms (Frosty grunts?) that are relentlessly coming at is. Yes it is beautiful, really, this is a beautiful noise, almost graceful, there is a genuine beauty in here in the extreme intensity, in the red light and the sound coming back off the black walls of this rather fine venue.

Most of those in attendance are soaking it up rather moving with it, you get the idea that pretty much everyone in here is at one with the band, that no one needs convincing, that as deep underground as Craven idol might be, no one needs to be won over tonight, that there’s a deep appreciation in the relative stillness of the audience, this is serious, this is seriously good. The set isn’t much more than forty-five minutes long, sometimes less really is more, blistering, booming, extreme heaviness. Brutal yes, but there is far more than just intense brutality and even in a small box of a back room like this, a room where we’re struggling to find the clarity and hear the songs in the glorious stew of noise, even under these intense conditions, that there’s something a little extra to this band, that they’re a cut above your average extreme metal band, that even in this space, that little extra that Craven Idol have comes through. A beautifully intense encounter in an East London backroom, brutal extreme metal yes, but there’s just a little more than just that to North London’s Craven idol (sw)     

More: Bandcamp / Facebook / Isengard Promotions (the people who put the gig on)

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