This is an excerpt of an article written by Tom Girard
Over the past year and a half Sound Guernsey has not only given the island’s youngsters a chance to experience live music but also provided a platform for them to play as new bands emerge.
Their April 2018 show at The Fermain Tavern then was a bit of an odd one as, for the first time in a long time, it only featured some of the, to put it politely, more experienced and longstanding members of the island’s music scene – in this case all loosely grouped into the heavier and noisier end of the spectrum.
After a fairly lengthy hiatus while searching for a new drummer Coastal Fire Dept returned to start the show with a powerful dose of ‘grunge’ influenced rock.
While the trio weren’t the most energetic on stage their sheer power of volume, clearly influenced by Dinosaur Jr’s famed reputation, made a good impact and kept a group of newly found supporters nodding away on the dance floor throughout.
While they may not be breaking much new ground stylistically while they were playing it sounded like the 90s never went away, and that was no bad thing, while the joint vocal moments between frontman Ollie Goddard and new drummer Gareth Thomas (formerly of Day Release, but we won’t hold that against him) really set off the songs well.
The grunge inspired theme continued, but with a whole extra dose of psychedelia and an extra sense of mystique as Dolmens took to the stage for what was, to my mind, the relatively new band’s best set yet.
With Stace ‘Ferrigno’ Blondel and Hollie ‘Geena’ Martorella as hugely engaging, but counterpointed performers, and the nearest Dolmens has to frontpeople, the young audience wasn’t put off by the lack of chat or direct engagement (save for Stace’s inevitable excursion into the throng), instead revelling in the huge and heavy sounds that evoked a feeling of sunset slipping into midnight without bothering with the frustrating hours in between.
The set built from a strong start to a truly tremendous climax of Black Plastic that left the audience apparently spent.
Thankfully Granite Wolf were on hand to revive them, and revive them they did as they blasted into their unforgiving assault of hardcore metal that came across like the bastard child of Pantera and Machine Head fuelled by Breda.
Tom ‘Shinfo’ Domaille acted as a kind of ring leader, he whipped both his bandmates and the crowd into a frenzy that included circle pits and even a wall of death (thankfully executed in a friendly manner).
The band seemed to derail themselves on a couple of occasions with sheer exuberance but dealt with it quickly and kept the momentum rolling leading to what could easily have been a highlight performance if it hadn’t been for what came next.
After a slightly longer than intended break doom laden trio Brunt began their set of crushingly heavy and terrifyingly slow music, as is customary, with no announcement and gradually the audience began fill the dance floor once again.
Across the set Brunt were their usual tightly focussed selves, debuting some new material that delivered more of the same atmospheric black magick fuzz rock, but it was about half way through their performance that something shifted in the room.
As the young audience seemed to lock into the atmosphere being created the whole thing took on a kind of spontaneous ritual atmosphere with the crowd moving and chanting in unison to the doom laden rhythms oozing from the stage.
If this all sounds a bit ominous, it was clear throughout that both audience and band were taking this in a fun spirit but it still closed the night on one of the most surreal experiences I’ve had at a show while also marking one of the best outings I’ve seen from Brunt leading to a highlight set to end things for this month at Sound.
