In these days of ever more splintered identities, where community is increasingly something found online rather than in your neighbourhood, and we must all be in constant thrall to the latest trend, the role of tradition in keeping us rooted has rarely been more important. So as I push open the door to the wood panelled, glitter strewn live room at Hackney’s Moth Club, accompanied by my favourite gig partner – our mouths singing with the memory of our freshly gobbled Szechuan noodles – and the familiar fug of thick, sweaty gig air hits my face, I break into a familiar smile. Since first seeing them live at The Ivy House in Nunhead seven years ago, an evening in the company of The Burning Hell has become an annual ritual. The songs may change, the line-up of musicians accompanying the core duo of songwriter Mathias Kom and multi-instrumentalist Ariel Sharratt may rotate, but the feeling they create remains the same, only growing in magnitude with each visit.
More of that later, as first there’s a set from Jon McKiel and his collaborator Jay Crocker to enjoy. As is the recent custom at Burning Hell shows, they’ll be back on stage later as part of the headliners’ backing band, but as with recent incumbents of this unorthodox but highly efficient role such as Shotgun Jimmie and Stephen Lambke, McKiel and Crocker quickly prove they are not just here to make up the numbers. Mixing gentle acoustic folk with wibbly electronics (provided by Crocker seated on a stool, cradling a multi-knobbed synthesiser) and occasionally ramming everything through a pedalboard provides a pleasingly woozy sensation, bringing us to the brink of warm fuzzy comfort and then giving our eardrums a tickle with an unexpected change of tone just before we drift away. My gig partner makes a favourable comparison with Beach House, but I don’t know their music well enough to validate this. *Makes note to listen to Beach House and hope it sounds something like this
The Burning Hell take to the stage and launch into ‘Celebrities In Cemeteries’, the jovial indie rock romper that opens their excellent new album Ghost Palace, and that weird thing that music can do happens where time collapses in on itself and you’re enjoying the moment you’re in whilst simultaneously being whisked back through time to every other time you’ve seen the same band or listened to the same song, and enjoying those too and all that joy swirls around in your head in an intoxicating fizz, compelling you to dance and smile and sing every word back at the group of people who are, at the same time, singing them to you.
The next however many minutes it is flash by in a jumbled technicolour haze. We get plenty of songs from the new record, including an emphatic ‘My Home Planet’ – it’s always a treat when Ariel picks up the sax or the mic, and this one sees her doing both. Throw in rapid-fire dual vocals, a couple of quite ridiculously joyful drum fills and some excellent word play (“We’re getting used to the smoke, the fires are out of control, But we didn’t start them, no, like eight billion Billy Joels“) and you have a recipe for pure, unfiltered fun.
There are plenty of old favourites thrown in too, ‘Wallflowers’ from 2013’s People LP sparks the first mass singalong of the night, and the room falls silent for an achingly beautiful rendition of ‘Eugene & Maurice’, with Ariel’s breathy vocal, backed only by Mathias’ lightly strummed guitar, telling the love story of psychologist Eugene Glynn and author/illustrator Maurice Sendak, best known for Where The Wild Things Are. There can’t be a dry eye left in the house.
The Burning Hell have an uncanny knack for conjuring up phrases that connect with an audience, and it seems like with each new record another track is added to the canon of tunes guaranteed to get the whole crowd to raise their voices in song. On 2022’s Garbage Island it was ‘Dirty Microphones’ and its refrain “It’s just music, we used to make music“, which receives a similarly rousing response to last year’s show, and this time (as predicted in my review of the album) we all find ourselves crooning and humming “There’s a hole in my heart, The size of my whole heart, Mmmm” to title track ‘Ghost Palace’. If they keep going at this rate they’ll be able to save themselves the work of performing at all and just have us sing the whole set ourselves.
Following a funked up ‘Bird Queen of Garbage Island’, they momentarily retreat to the strange caged area that makes for backstage at The Moth Club before returning to whip us into emotional frenzy once again with the peerless relationship origin story waltz ‘Fuck The Government, I Love You’, belted back by the crowd at such a volume that I fear the ceiling may come down in a shower of glitter and dust. We pick ourselves up from the emotional puddle we’ve melted into just in time for the closing epic ‘Barbarians’, a densely worded Viking fable set to rollicking rock and roll guitars with the occasional psych break. And then it’s over for another year, when we will all gather once more to cram into another sweaty room somewhere in London and sing these songs together.
There are bands that appeal to the heart. There are bands that appeal to the head. There are bands that appeal to your dancing feet. Very occasionally there are bands that do all three, and they are to be savoured. For me, that band is The Burning Hell, and I look forward to continuing the tradition when they next return to these shores.
The Burning Hell: Website / Facebook / Instagram / Bandcamp
Review and photography by Paul Maps
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