Please Please You & Brudenell PresentsBell Witch
Knoll
Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
Saturday 13th April, 7.30pm
£20adv >> https://brudenellpresents.seetickets.com/event/bell-witch/brudenell-social-club/2910996
Nothing's bigger than life. All vastnesses -- expanding space, infinite time -- crouch inside of consciousness. On a historical scale, to say nothing of a cosmic one, the individual human life vanishes, and yet it's the only aperture any of us get into reality. It's barely there, and it's all there is.
That's the paradox Bell Witch drives at. For more than a decade, the Pacific Northwestern doom metal band has sent tides surging over the seawalls of the song form, unraveling conventional expectations about the ways music stations itself in time to absorb a listener's attention. Rather than seek catharsis, the duo's songs heave themselves through time at a glacial pace, staving off resolution in favor of a trancelike capsule eternity. Invoking both boundlessness and claustrophobia in the same charged gesture, Bell Witch cultivates a sense of time outside of time, an oasis inside an increasingly frenetic media culture.
For their new album, The Clandestine Gate, bassist Dylan Desmond and drummer Jesse Shreibman exploded Bell Witch's bounds. Like 2017's lauded Mirror Reaper, The Clandestine Gate is a single 83-minute track -- a composition that pulses and breathes on a filmic timeframe. It constitutes the first chapter in a planned triptych of longform albums, collectively called Future's Shadow.
'I’ve never heard anything quite like Mirror Reaper, the overwhelming, suffocating, brain-rearranging new piece of music from the Seattle drone-metal duo Bell Witch. Its one song is 83 minutes long, and those 83 minutes are enough to fuck with your entire concept of time.'
Stereogum, Album Of The Week
'As much as The Clandestine Gate is the culmination of Bell Witch’s last decade, it also marks the surefooted start of their next several years, the first step in a truly audacious and titanic mission.'
Ptitchfork
'Mournful, melodic and heavier than hell, this album further cements Bell Witch as arcane masters of Funeral Doom, proficient in summoning deeply moving dirges and crushing waves of noise. ‘The Clandestine Gate’ pulls you in and refuses to let go, staying with you long after the record has stopped spinning.'
Norman Records
Event Venue
Brudenell Social Club, 33 Queens Road,Leeds, United Kingdom
Tickets