As muscle-bound and deadly as the barbarian antihero for which it’s named, Conan doesn’t do subtlety, by Crom.
For its 40-minute set as part of the MetalSucks showcase at Dirty Dog Bar on Wednesday, the UK trio eschewed anything that smacked of development – no progressive rock moves, no nods to melody, no swing, no innovation. Instead, the band lives, breathes, and craps bulldozer-heavy British doom like Mama Sabbath used to make: crawling tempos, bone-simple riffs, other-dimensional vocals, and a volume setting that would stun an elephant.
Joined by guest bassist Renata Castagna of former tourmates Samothrace, guitarist/vocalist Jon Davis and drummer Rich Lewis yanked the songs by the hair and smashed their faces into the dirt, using each riff to drill slowly but surely down to the Earth’s molten core. Davis tuned his Travis Bean flying V down so low it almost sounded like another bass. When he and Castagna bore down, no bowel was safe. The guitarist’s hoarse shout infiltrated the haze of bottom-heavy distortion like a dissipating ghost, serving as pure texture and making questions of lyrical meaning moot.
The band mainly excavated from its third LP Revengeance, adding in a couple of older ringers emerging from a wall of grunge. The differences between “Thunderhoof,” “Wrath Gauntlet,” and “Foehammer” were minimal, but the goal here was to overwhelm with sheer thunder, an approach the modest-sized but enthusiastic crowd adored. Worshipping unabashedly at the church of riff, Conan crushed boulders.
This article appears in March 11 • 2016.
