Extra Life, New River Studios, London N4, 27th June 2025 – What is there to say, well lots and lots really, there are so many layers to Extra Life, to beautifully voiced frontman Charlie Looker, to the words that demand your attention, your questions, your interpretations, your imagination. The band suddenly came back last year with a fifth rather unexpected album, The Sacred Vowel, a gloriously powerful album, external battles, the whole question of why not?  That almost terrifying despair, that falling in to the pit again, and then at the same time so gloriously up, a battle that he’s just about winning (or at least the hope is he is). These people are artists, all four of them and before anything else, I did scribble on a piece of paper during the set just so I wouldn’t forget to say that it would be so easy, with the three of them in front of him, to forget to mention how perfectly coloured that drumming is within the whole body of it all, Cameron Wisch, and how just right his almost painterly touch is and how it all flows so so well needs to be mentioned.

You feel a great musical trust between the four of them up there, a bond that’s a little more than just the chemistry. Timba Harris with his violin, his trumpet and a whole load of things he’s playing with on the floor, Toby Driver on the other side, he of the mighty mighty Kayodot and many solo things, looking like he’s really enjoying not being the centre of attention and just underlining it all. What arrangements and compositions, two of the greatest composers side by side, this is Charlie Looker’s thing though and there he is centre stage, looking rather unassuming or understated as he quietly walks on and as both a lyricist and frontman the nearest comparison, and we do not say this lightly, is Peter Hammill, they both have this ability to self examine, to face up, with an almost relish, to face up to life, this band deserve an audience and the audience deserve them.

This gig was something rather special    

There’s a constant tension between the sacred and profane running through all of Extra Life’s work.  A running battle between the flesh and the transcendent, a fight that never ceases, reeling from depth to height, from decay to eternity, sometimes by way of ruthless humour. 

Five albums, each extraordinary, beyond genre, timeless:  the first, Secular Works, an opening salvo, a meditation on excess; Made Flesh, doing what it says on the tin, all about physicality and body, what we do with it and to it.  Third album Dream Seeds (2012) a hard, hard listen with its eviscerating look at grief and regret and misused childhood, and then Extra Life seemed to be no more. Nobody expected the abrupt reappearance of Extra Life in 2022 – with, of all things, ‘a sequel to Secular Works’.  Suddenly declaring existence with a pristine album that’s all about… triumph? Maybe not total triumph over the adversities of life but a coming to terms and an acknowledgement of inner strength, of persistence and existing, maybe the sort of themes born of the pandemic and a world facing up to an existential threat.  No longer quite so ‘secular’, ready to invoke higher powers… whatever they are…

There’s songs from most of the albums tonight – and these are dense, finely crafted, layered, complex compositions, so are they going to cut it in a rock gig setting where the sound is going to be a challenge?  Yes, and with the energy and power (that word again) dialled up.  With Timba alternating on violin and trumpet, and a rhythm section of avant rock “rehearsal heavy” complex-composition veterans par excellence, they’re relaxing in their happy place (how? how do they do it?) as Charlie Looker releases an absolute beast of a performance, no holding back. And the newest album The Sacred Vowel provides the highlights with a terrifying rendition of Three Worms – the song that nails the inner fight of an addict, sums it up and drives it home in a brutally simple way. Only the show opener, title track The Sacred Vowel can save us – twelve minutes of a journey up and away from all that, the equally simple solution of forgetting and release in the moment – ‘Can I just sing?’  

So yes, it’s not just a gig – it comes with a lifetime’s baggage, and that’s good, that’s what songs, and gigs and standing in a sweaty room with a handful of others who ‘get it’ are FOR. The good ones, the ones you never forget. Where you see something extraordinary happen.   At the end of a sixteen date tour of Europe and the UK, most bands are musically tight, maybe at each other’s throats, maybe a lot poorer, maybe just doing a job… or maybe in a place that defies description, reminding us what the whole game is about: transcendence, rooted in real life, rich with inexplicable meaning. Extra, and alive…

And while we’re here, in this beautifully scrappy looking old-school venue, a defiantly DIY venue playing good music in the bar and alive with information on the walls, a word to Kunal and his Chaos Theory operation, he and his team’s constantly championing and enabling of left-field art, music and otherness, all the risk taking and the stress involved (believe me, we know). We so so need people like Chaos Theory putting on events like this, it is something not to be taken for granted. It is the spirit of the times of things Sonic Relief, the Eight Day Itch, without the dedication of people like Kunal, bands like this would not be on stages in front of us, something very much not to be taken for granted, support your underground gig promoters, treasure them, treasure these scenes, they are to be celebrated (and on that note, apologies to Seaming Too, the show opener tonight, of whom everyone spoke highly, art commitments kept us away, we still haven’t, after all these years, worked out how to be in two places at once).    

This gig was something rather special and we make no apologies if we do sometimes go a little over the top, music excites, art matters, performances and bands like this is why we still do this Organ thing, and we make no apologies for sharing the lo-fi bootleg quality live footage, the sound inthe venue wasn’t the greatest, the footage hopefully captures just a fraction of what happened that night… (M/S)

Previously on these pages

ORGAN THING: Not an inch of excess, every second, every note vital, this is economic music. Have Extra Life released the album of the year already?

“Extra Life (from Queens, New York), formed in 2007 as the main vehicle for New York-based guitarist/composer/singer, Charlie Looker. The music is a fusion of aggressive math rock, dark dramatic pop, modern classical, and ancient liturgical music. Looker was a founding member of NY noise-chamber outfit Zs, and of industrial metal band Psalm Zero. Extra Life went on hiatus in 2013, and returned in full force in 2022”.

www.charlielooker.com / Bandcamp / chaostheorymusic

And the support, Seaming To via Bandcamp