Thorrs Hammer: live @ Supersonic 2009

I was made dimly aware of the history of Thorrs Hammer by some acquaintances I ran into before the show, and I have to thank Corey Allender of Arbouretum for telling me I had to go see their set, he was right. Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley of Sunn0))) are the two guitarists, but I don’t have access to the internet right now so I can’t put names to the vocalist, bass player and drummer.

I knew that they hadn’t played together for fifteen years or thereabouts, and that they only had a short albums worth of recorded material. Nonetheless there were a lot of people at their set in the warehouse where the Space 2 stage stood. That might be due to O’Malley and Anderson’s ascent to the status of figureheads in the Doom Metal scene since the hiatus of this group, but it doesn’t matter much. They all gave off the impression that they were ecstatic to be playing together again and they were integrated in a way that suggested there was hope for both new material and future shows.

I saw Sunn0))) play at Primavera a couple of months back (review here) and I enjoyed it, but that had a lot to do with the weird ambience of hearing such music surrounded by a lot of hip young things hiding their bewilderment by hobnobbing and generally maintaining their cool appearance. It was different here; the crowd weren’t there to notch up a Doom Sludge experience on their Indie cred stamp collection. Oh, except for me, and a few others perhaps.

Since putting my Tool t-shirts to the back of the wardrobe and giving away my Sepultura CD’s when I was twenty (having realised I was never going to get into them however hard I tried) I haven’t had much do with anything even vaguely metal related. But for a long time I have felt like Doom has been circling me; there was something in it that was calling out for me to immerse myself in it and see what happened. This was the night it happened, with the consecutive sets of Thorrs Hammer and Corrupted.

I vaguely remember there being four breaks in the set, suggesting they played five pieces. To me it all sounded much the same, the female vocalist projecting her guttural rumbles, the bass player adopting the facial expressions of a weight lifter every time he slammed the room with a four string bass chord, the guitarists ringing every last drop from every way down strum and the drummer pounding out that slow, creeping inevitability that characterises the genre.

I was excited by the music from the word go, but it was about halfway through when I started to feel a peculiar kind of drowsiness taking over my body. It was deeply immersive. As the singer broke into warm smiles and laughter at the end of a song and Stephen O’Malley boomed some announcement that made the crowd laugh or cheer I felt as if I was somewhere else. Not only am I completely unfamiliar with the symbols of the culture surrounding this music (and therefore unaware of the significance of much of what was said or expressed) I was feeling so overwhelmed that I barely surfaced before the next song began.

Alongside a feeling of being absorbed by earth and dirt I picked up on a sexual energy in their music. Now the singer did happen to be a strikingly beautiful woman, and I likely wouldn’t be saying this if she hadn’t been a part of the band, but it wasn’t some Motley Crue kind of trip. It was more primal, linked to a basic, unfetishised and unfiltered feeling of sexuality and sensuality. It wasn’t directed, or emanating from the singer alone, it came from the whole sound and was more a resonance with that deep underlying sense of connection than an arousal. It didn’t dominate my experience of the set by any means, but it was as much an element as the expression of pain, fear and the simple thudding satisfaction of tectonic rock music.

I left the room feeling elated, with a lightness of being I did not expect. I don’t know if this experience will translate into listening to this kind of music on record, it hasn’t happened yet, but I can imagine that it might now. For all my feelings of not being a part of a so-called scene, I felt united with everyone in the room. All it required was to listen to and feel the music. Like the difference between aloneness and loneliness, the Venn diagrams of heaviness and darkness, darkness and cruelty, cruelty and longing are far more complicated and intuitive than the theatrical fashions and growling vocals led me to believe. I felt a lot of love and compassion in that room, but I’m not trying to re-brand a genre, because it must be said that it more than earns its current name.

Many of the fans I have spoken to seem to instantly understand people who have been interested but wanted to leave due to physical or emotional sensations induced by the woozy body blow of so much syncopated low sound. I felt high on it and in touch with the world around me, and it had nothing to do with alcohol or drugs. And that was how Thorrs Hammer popped my Doom Cherry.

Live Pics courtesy of Stu Green / shot2bits.net):