Editors Forward:
"Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way" an ode to an ending from Wales' most famous poet, powerful words that signify change and loss, more apt than ever when Ofnus V1.0 take to the stage one final time with vocalist Will behind the mic.
This is the formation line up, born from the indifference and frustration with other projects, immediately conceiving an album, Time Held Me Grey And Dying, and jumping on to the live stage to play across the UK. Festivals beckoned including the hallowed fields of Bloodstock and each show saw them increase their standing on the UK black metal market, atmospheric, apocalyptic and driven by unquenchable desire to spread their own brand of sadness across the world.
In rapid succession a follow up record called Valediction, improved on every level, the songwriting, the conceptual overtones, the scale, all reaching a higher echelon, which once again led to more shows and another trip, this time on a bigger stage with a bigger sound and bigger audience, befitting and altogether bigger band than the one I saw the first embers of just after the pandemic.
I've followed Ofnus on this journey, the band are friends, and as such there is no journalistic integrity to speak of here, just celebration, a celebration of Will's time in the band and the first chapter of their story drawing to a close. The emotions ran high, higher than any previous show, this is band who can make people weep, but the personal nature of what was unfolding on stage for me at least, carried extra resonance. I've grown to know these faces, these personalities, these people behind the instruments and the noise. Change comes but it doesn't mean it doesn't hurt.
However fate is a funny thing and on the day of the show I can down with a heavy illness that left me bed ridden, meaning that this final chapter of part one was to be lost to me forever. Fortunately I have some intrepid souls who braved storms football and half marathons to make sure we were there to capture these happenings in print and photo form.
Review By Simon Black
It’s been a while since I’ve seen openers Betrayers (6), and I was a little cautious about what I was going to get from Bristol’s Doomy purveyors of Grindcore, not least from the fact that they have some tough acts to warm the room up for and the last time I saw them I struggled with them somewhat. I needn’t have worried. They may have had a short 30 minutes to play with, but there were plenty in the room when they hit the stage and they kept them there. There’s a big difference this time out, as there’s a new drummer in the mix and the difference is palpable, bringing a level of precision and punch that had been missing in the past. The temptation with this style of Metal is to drag things out but add a drummer with a bit more technical precision and suddenly things feel edgy, dangerous and that little bit more brutal. The punters clearly agreed, and their reception was a genuine one. Let’s see where this takes them…
Pantheïst (10) are celebrating their 25th anniversary this year, and when the joint package with Ofnus normally hits the road together the younger band make way for the elder statesmen, but there are good reasons why things are reversed tonight despite the silver anniversary. They have recently released a collection of demos, B-Sides, covers and alternative versions of nuggets that packs a phenomenal punch despite being a filler release in order to get something out for the anniversary and I recommend you check it out.
The beauty of this band is that despite the hugely dynamic line up behind main man Kostas Panagiotou over the years, there’s a lot of strong material in that back catalogue. I’ve seen them a lot in recent years, and tonight once again the set is a complete mixture across the years. The reason being that this stable line-up is going from strength to strength.
The addition of soprano Linda Dumitru a few years back uplifted their sound enormously as she added depth to the sound essentially as a backing voice in the early days, but in those two years since, Pantheïst have completely revamped the arrangements of these songs live to split the vocal work between her and Kostas to best effect. From the moment they hit the stage and aided by what might be the best sound mix I have ever heard in this acoustic concrete sweat box, Pantheïst absolutely have this audience in the palm of their hands with an epic, moody and heart wrenchingly powerful performance.
My favourite song of theirs live was always the moody Be Here, because it showed the softer side of Panagiotou’s voice, but these days it is categorically Dumitru’s showcase. There’s an acoustic version on the new album, but the live version perfectly fuses her solo vocal delivery with the more full-on heavy instrumentals of the original. It’s powerful and moving, and not a little emotional. So powerful is here voice that I suspect that she may have triggered the notoriously sensitive decibel limiter on the P.A. even without the need for amplification. Even though it feels like the band are pulling their punch somewhat in deference to what follows, they regardless effortlessly slay this crowd, and illustrate to me once again why they really need to be playing halls about ten times larger. They still wouldn’t be big enough…
However, tonight is really all about Ofnus (10), and it’s a genuinely sad occasion. OK, this band’s unique brand of atmospheric Black Metal is always bloody sad - it’s their trademark, but tonight we say farewell to frontman Will Philpot. After three years that saw a band formed as a stopgap project formed when the bands they were a part of were all on some kind of hiatus come together, gel spectacularly and then leapfrog all the projects that spawned them across two albums and a remarkably short space of time, the exit of one of the most distinctive voices in Extreme Metal that I have ever had the privilege to watch is a bit of a kicker to be fair.
In that time they’ve gone from support slots in this very venue to playing Bloodstock twice and felt like they were on the cusp of something bigger and European, because quite frankly with the support of label Naturmacht and the contents of their pooled contacts in the business, that is clearly the next step and one that could see them explode. So, this is a potential body blow…
However, as with everything they have done from day one, this is handled with utmost professionalism. It would be easy to have just walked away, cancelled any forthcoming bookings and regrouped with a new voice, but the band have a lot of friends in this room tonight, and saying goodbye like this was the right thing to do. And rewarded we were, with a full 90 minute set (30 minutes longer than advertised), which saw the superlative second album delivered pretty much in full, and still leaving thirty minutes of time to fill from their debut, this was an emotive and heartfelt gift back to a room full of fans who really are going to miss this incarnation, myself included.
The performance is as brutally tight as ever, and once again the sound mix is superb allowing clear and crisp definition of every single instrument, but the night belongs to Will, who talks to the crowd way more than usual, and is clearly feeling emotional himself. He’s not alone… Ofnus will bounce back I am sure, they’re all hardened pro’s on the cusp of something huge, but this hometown farewell show for their distinctive frontman is going to stick in the memory for some time to come. This version of Ofnus is dead … long live the new Ofnus…
And they will… (just without Will)…
It’s been a while since I’ve seen openers Betrayers (6), and I was a little cautious about what I was going to get from Bristol’s Doomy purveyors of Grindcore, not least from the fact that they have some tough acts to warm the room up for and the last time I saw them I struggled with them somewhat. I needn’t have worried. They may have had a short 30 minutes to play with, but there were plenty in the room when they hit the stage and they kept them there. There’s a big difference this time out, as there’s a new drummer in the mix and the difference is palpable, bringing a level of precision and punch that had been missing in the past. The temptation with this style of Metal is to drag things out but add a drummer with a bit more technical precision and suddenly things feel edgy, dangerous and that little bit more brutal. The punters clearly agreed, and their reception was a genuine one. Let’s see where this takes them…
Pantheïst (10) are celebrating their 25th anniversary this year, and when the joint package with Ofnus normally hits the road together the younger band make way for the elder statesmen, but there are good reasons why things are reversed tonight despite the silver anniversary. They have recently released a collection of demos, B-Sides, covers and alternative versions of nuggets that packs a phenomenal punch despite being a filler release in order to get something out for the anniversary and I recommend you check it out.
The beauty of this band is that despite the hugely dynamic line up behind main man Kostas Panagiotou over the years, there’s a lot of strong material in that back catalogue. I’ve seen them a lot in recent years, and tonight once again the set is a complete mixture across the years. The reason being that this stable line-up is going from strength to strength.
The addition of soprano Linda Dumitru a few years back uplifted their sound enormously as she added depth to the sound essentially as a backing voice in the early days, but in those two years since, Pantheïst have completely revamped the arrangements of these songs live to split the vocal work between her and Kostas to best effect. From the moment they hit the stage and aided by what might be the best sound mix I have ever heard in this acoustic concrete sweat box, Pantheïst absolutely have this audience in the palm of their hands with an epic, moody and heart wrenchingly powerful performance.
My favourite song of theirs live was always the moody Be Here, because it showed the softer side of Panagiotou’s voice, but these days it is categorically Dumitru’s showcase. There’s an acoustic version on the new album, but the live version perfectly fuses her solo vocal delivery with the more full-on heavy instrumentals of the original. It’s powerful and moving, and not a little emotional. So powerful is here voice that I suspect that she may have triggered the notoriously sensitive decibel limiter on the P.A. even without the need for amplification. Even though it feels like the band are pulling their punch somewhat in deference to what follows, they regardless effortlessly slay this crowd, and illustrate to me once again why they really need to be playing halls about ten times larger. They still wouldn’t be big enough…
However, tonight is really all about Ofnus (10), and it’s a genuinely sad occasion. OK, this band’s unique brand of atmospheric Black Metal is always bloody sad - it’s their trademark, but tonight we say farewell to frontman Will Philpot. After three years that saw a band formed as a stopgap project formed when the bands they were a part of were all on some kind of hiatus come together, gel spectacularly and then leapfrog all the projects that spawned them across two albums and a remarkably short space of time, the exit of one of the most distinctive voices in Extreme Metal that I have ever had the privilege to watch is a bit of a kicker to be fair.
In that time they’ve gone from support slots in this very venue to playing Bloodstock twice and felt like they were on the cusp of something bigger and European, because quite frankly with the support of label Naturmacht and the contents of their pooled contacts in the business, that is clearly the next step and one that could see them explode. So, this is a potential body blow…
However, as with everything they have done from day one, this is handled with utmost professionalism. It would be easy to have just walked away, cancelled any forthcoming bookings and regrouped with a new voice, but the band have a lot of friends in this room tonight, and saying goodbye like this was the right thing to do. And rewarded we were, with a full 90 minute set (30 minutes longer than advertised), which saw the superlative second album delivered pretty much in full, and still leaving thirty minutes of time to fill from their debut, this was an emotive and heartfelt gift back to a room full of fans who really are going to miss this incarnation, myself included.
The performance is as brutally tight as ever, and once again the sound mix is superb allowing clear and crisp definition of every single instrument, but the night belongs to Will, who talks to the crowd way more than usual, and is clearly feeling emotional himself. He’s not alone… Ofnus will bounce back I am sure, they’re all hardened pro’s on the cusp of something huge, but this hometown farewell show for their distinctive frontman is going to stick in the memory for some time to come. This version of Ofnus is dead … long live the new Ofnus…
And they will… (just without Will)…
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