Gnod / Vanishing (live at Strange Brew)

Bristol
5 May 2026

It seems like Gareth Smith is the Mark E of Vanishing, but the vision here doesn’t feel weird enough to sustain, the spoken word lyrics lose all their energy by being spoken, and Vanishing don’t feel like they have that much energy to lose.

If this was a single slice of spoken-word Northern poetry in the middle of a longer set, you can imagine it might work quite well, especially given that the surrounding music is often utterly mesmerising in itself; but the voice pulls everything towards it at a single tempo and the words just aren’t strange enough or beautiful enough to keep my focus.

As it stands, despite the beautiful drones of the string instruments and the sometimes almost Ornette Colemanesque circular whirls of Karl D’Silva’s saxophone and clarinet, Vanishing never quite get going. It may be the wrong time and the wrong place.

Gnod, on the other hand, begin with Swans-like intensity and keep going through what seems to be — to these quite possibly exhausted ears — a kind of personal trawl through various forms of extra-curricular guitar music. Gnod clearly have a lot of influences and they wear them proudly, and find fun ways of co-opting them into their own unique patterns.

If it is some kind of historical trawl, then it makes a certain demented sense that the first track could easily have been on Swans’ To Be Kind; Gnod aren’t letting us take our history in any kind of chronological order; this is developing in space more than time.

Now, I may be way off here and none of this is intentional, but over the next hour or so I swear I hear them riffing on the heaviest locked-groove moments of Hawkwind, complete with bubbling synth undercurrents and ferocious Lemmy-era bass; then there’s a shorter detour into Big Black’s ‘rocket guitar’ and drum machine, with accompanying yelps (I hear “Dead Billy” in there somewhere), a section that really reminded me of (Charged) GBH’s “City Baby Attacked By Rats”, pulled (almost) apart like a Stretch Armstrong toy, and then into some Loop-like guitar scrawl and repetition.

The key is that, improbably for such a psychoactively charged band, all of these transitions are incredibly smooth (not the word but you get what I mean). They don’t let the intensity dip; they just hurl themselves at their instruments and search for each others’ groove. They find it, and then they keep going. We want them to. People in the audience are finding their inner head-banger.

Despite what feels like the almost constant potential for collapse and chaos, Gnod feel incredibly tight and well-rehearsed (or perhaps simply intuitive) and you can tell how much they love playing together. There are a lot of guitars on stage, but they never feel like they are attempting to overpower each other; there’s no one here trying to be the main character. Instead, they find the way and then they stick to it.

As The Fall once taught us: “We dig repetition; we’ve repetition in the music, and we’re never going to lose it”. The crowd go wild, the guitars lock-in, the drums pound… The Fall weren’t wrong.

-Loki-