The Hug & Pint 20 October
Every day is a school day as they say. In starting to write this post, I found out that The Hug & Pint is named after the 2003 album by Arab Strap and has been offering live music at the bottom of Great Western Road since 2015. It’s basement setting for tonight’s show is in keeping with the music we were there to hear, dark and intimate in equal measure.
Dragged Up
Opening up for headliners Smote was local band Dragged Up, and they certainly lived up to their reputation with an exciting and absorbing set of songs, mostly lifted from their 2024 album High On Ripple.
There were a number of musical influences that could be ticked off across their set, The Velvet Underground and Pavement immediately sprung to mind.
Having influences is one thing, what the band members of Dragged Up are able to successfully conceive, both on their album and playing live, is to put their own stamp on the songs, with changing song signatures and melodies sitting comfortably with screeching guitar breaks.
The band have been on the go since 2018 building a solid fanbase along the way, though with several band changes over the years. On Monday night the guitar interplay between Eva Gnatiuk and Simon Shaw was very much the key focal point of the show as they bounced between finger picking lead and thrashing chord sequences leaving Lauren Peters on bass and Stephen Mors on drums to maintain the rhythm.
With no previous knowledge of the band before the show, not even a whiff of a quick look across Spotify or YouTube, the relatively short set was enough to convince that this won’t be the last time we’ll meet, and it wasn’t long afterwards that their album was added to the collection for further play.
Smote
Unlike Dragged Up, I was pretty familiar with the work of Daniel Foggin, aka Smote and since listening to the 2021 album Drommon, had been on my list of acts to see live.
And the band that had been assembled to tour the most recent album, Songs From The Free House, didn’t disappoint with Rob Law on drums, Callum Church on guitar, Sally Mason on Bass, and Laura Garcia on Viola and MS20.
How do you best describe the experience of listening to the music of Smote within the very intimate confines of The Hug & Pint basement? When you combine the elements of drone & doom within the envelope of psychedelic music which is then played ferociously by all on stage it becomes a truly absorbing and immersive experience.
While Daniel Foggin is the linchpin of the band, a huge element of the set was the drumming of Rob Law who set the tempo throughout. Bathed in sweat as he left the stage, we were in awe of the energy expounded that had provided, not only the beat for the others to follow, but enabled us all to explore the depth of music being played by the others.
From listening to some of the audience there’s an obvious appeal to the style of music that Smote offers, with several at the recent gig by The Janitors and others a few weeks back. It’s a genre not for the faint hearted based around repetitive basslines, ear piercing drone sounds and pagan like vocals.
While the opening to the set was via Daniel on flute it was merely the call to arms for the band and the audience as within minutes, the drums were pounding, Laura was working her magic on the MS20 and Callum and Sally entered the fray to create a sonic boom that continued to reverberate for the rest of the show.
For a fleeting point during the set, it sounded as if War Pigs from Black Sabbath was about to hammer out the speakers, it had that dark feel about how the song was being developed. It was only fleeting though.
The evening ended as it had begun, the audience in a hypnotic trance, full of appreciation for what they had seen and heard. An hour later, as I was about to enter the house, I still had the pounding beats ringing in my ears. A sure-fire sign that the night had been a huge success.
