Gig Review: SILVERWINGKILLER at White Hotel

SILVERWINGKILLER headline a remarkable bill that proves Manchester's next great musical movement is already taking shape.

It makes sense for SILVERWINGKILLER to headline the White Hotel. It makes perfect tragic sense. The legendary Salford club may have made its name for its eclectic late nights and keen mix of esoteric aesthetics with industrial grit, but an aspect of it that has always been ever so slightly underrated is its excellence as a venue for bands. A strong sound system and a core relationship with the city's best promoters act as a stage for both out-of-town experimentalists and some of the city's best homegrown talents. Despite the news of its closure, SILVERWINGKILLER’s night as headliners feels like a testament. To both what a gig can be capable of in the right hands with the right bands, and a signal to what the future sound of the city may be. Having risen rapidly among the ranks of the city's new live-focused electronic scene, SILVERWINGKILLER are no strangers to the Whit Hotels' grim steel shutters and icy white crucifixes. To have a band, a little over two years into their ascent, headline isn’t just a mark of their success but rather a mark of Manchester's own success. A keen example of something new emerging out of the city's long history of stark and harsh punk experimentalism.

It’s still light out when opener +44Kaligula takes to the stage, but amid the dim obsidian silence of White Hotels' interior, she stands like a siren in a pitch-black sea. Alone on stage, the only sign of light was her glimmering neon mic, and she delivered a set of rapturous electronic folk soundscapes. Her voice aching into a call through the darkness as the sound system lets loose waves of near ecclesiastic croons that are pierced through by her aching vocal tones. At points, she resembles something close to the industrial crooners of the late 2010s. The mixture of rapturous noise with her glorious voice recalls the likes of Lingua Ignota or Anna Von Hausswolf. Her yellow gloves illuminated by noon and her face wreathed in golden hair, her performance is at once striking and seductive. Offering equal amounts of comfort and comfort. Yet among these grand tones, moments of almost folk emerge. Her voice takes on the homespun odd tone of Joanna Newsom against a swarm of chittering electronica and percussion. Despite the small crowd in attendance, everyone seems enthralled as she commands the stage, laying out her mix of art pop balladry and darkwave gloom to heavy applause.

Soon after, Mogan follows. On some level, he’s an obvious pick to accompany SILVERWINGKILLER, having been featured alongside them, Crimewave, Buffee, and Another Country in a recent Crack scene piece. But alongside +44Kaligula, he serves to help highlight the growing branch of new bleak electronica emerging from the city, a scene SILVERWINGKILLER seems set to lead charge of as it marches further from the northern metropolises' aching skyscrapers and wet, humid streets. His set mixes harsh industrial techno with swooning gothic grandeur and EBM rhythms. Joined on stage by a flute player and local noise artist Adrian Steele on sax, he opens with a gloomy noirish ache of horns and woodwind. Slowly letting tension build till his voice emerges, and what a voice it is. Stuck somewhere between the gloom-ridden sixties grandeur of Scott Walker and Nick Cave’s gothic command, it elevates his discrete take on art pop into something romantic despite the harshness. But that harshness is key to what makes his sound swoon so well. The collapsing dancing beats, which jitter amid static against his accompanying players' smokey and gloomy sounds, cause his voice to appear like a dim light at the end of a tunnel. Flickering between bright and dark, reaching out to grasp something beyond the incoming collapse that surrounds us.

Amidst his and Kaligula’s sets, it feels as though the obvious choice for third support would be found amidst the city's new electronic mavericks. But while Crimewave, Buffee, and Another Country are among the cities' most glittering new stars, the choice to have South Africa’s Twenty-One Children play is an inspired one. The punk three piece set the crowd alight, no more subtle dancing under jets of fog chugging out the smoke machines, sure things are a bit more lively during the opening minutes as the guitarist and drummer tear through a chugging hardcore jam but as soon as the lead singer runs out on stage grabbing the mic with enough velocity that he threatens to crash down into the crowd a moshpit emerges. What follows is a blistering set of hardcore closer to the CBGBs and San Fran roots of the scene than the heftier metallic sound of the contemporary mainstream. What follows is a blistering set of hardcore closer to the CBGBs and San Fran roots of the scene than the heftier metallic sound of the contemporary mainstream. Their smaller setup of one guitarist, drummer, and vocalist allows room for tracks that focus on speed and frenetic over density. Rapid shattering drum strikes pair against chainsaw guitar work and screeching vocals that land somewhere between the snot-nosed rapid rage of Bad Brains and the screaming sass of Orchid. ‘I toured with the Ramones, and that was punker than punk’ is what one attendee tells me, and a part of me is inclined to agree. It's rapid yet joyous stuff, their lyrics carrying the mix of absurdity and sincerity that allowed early punks' rebellion to feel like an ignition switch for both societal and internal rebellion. But the main standout is the songs themselves, these bullets of sound that teeter between comedy and sincerity. Whether its twenty-seven second ballads about earthquakes in Japan, anti-media screech speeches, or a track dedicated to Ice Cube and Friday, which ends with a repeated scream ‘of today was a good day,’ each track sets the crowd off further into a series of two steps and stage dives that open the White Hotel up. With the lights on, the venue suddenly shifts, no longer a noirish club, its dank warehouse now appears the perfect setting for hardcore revelry. The whole thing is sent off by the guitarist jumping off the stage and grabbing onto a tall pillar transformed into a white crucifix and doing pull-ups as the crowd moshes on furiously.

Twenty One Children’s placement on the line-up feels like a callback to SILVERWINGKILLER’s early shows at the Star and Garter, performing to the arm flaying hardcore crowds of rising local punk promoters MCHC. It also acts nicely to prepare the crowd for the intense freneticism that has lead to the duo's ever-increasing live reputation. But that reputation still fails to shed a light on SILVERWINGKILLER’s unique mystique. Through supporting the likes of Fat Dog and Adult DVD, it could be easy to slot them in amongst the wave of New Rave revivalists sweeping the nation, but to place revivalism near SILVERWINGKILLER is a disservice; the pair are not recreating anything. With the lights going dim again, lead singer Shang takes to the stage as Baca joins her on drums, cranking out a mix of dancey jungle-like rhythms and heavy digital hardcore. The whole thing turns chaotic as Shang leaps off the stage, leading the crowd with her shouts, yelps, and screams against the synth punk backdrop of their gabber-like beats. It would all be so easy for the gig to just flow like this. Constant moshing against headbanging rhythms, and Shang leads the crowd in a violent dance built around rhythm overtaking melody. But it doesn’t, instead the whole thing shifts into a hay hypnagogia. Samples drifting in and amidst each other as Shang's voice takes on tones at points hymn-like, then screeching in and amidst her mosh leading commandments.

New single ‘Gunman Corner’ emerges as an easy crowd favourite, its tense build-up breaking way for a blast of droned transcendental singing that resembles Boredoms. 

But everything the band has released so far goes down a treat live. The quasi-electroclash banger ‘ROOF ON FIRE (X OVER9000)’ sets the crowd alight with its sudden burst of explosive drums and sampled vocals, and ‘S.W.K.’ is an early highlight; it comes out like a police alarm designed to signal the crowd towards explosive riot-like movement. Yet it's in the slower moments where the genius of Silverwingkiller’s live show becomes apparent. The slow-moving synth hypnagogia of ‘JING’AN TEMPLE’ causes the revelry to swell into slow dancing, the synths coming together with Shang's vocals to dislocate the whole night from The White Hotel or Salford or Greater Manchester entirely, yet Baca’s cymbal hits clash like an alarm at 5AM, a warning that the sludgy urban dream scape they created will soon give way to further explosive revelries. But perhaps the night's best moment is ‘Shang’s Film’. The song's jittery tension causes the crowd to get ready for another pit to emerge, only for the song to drift away as it rises into spacey aesthetics that land closer to the ambience of Berlin school than Silverwingkiller’s usual chaos. Not that the chaos isn’t brilliant, especially when Shang joins the crowd, or Baca steps away from the drums to kick off tracks, dive into the moshpit, or hype up the audience into a destructive mania. But it is the context that chaos exists within that makes it so interesting. The duo's mix of punk attitude, with post-sound cloud collage, and internet-Chinese aesthetics creates a sense of displacement. One that works excellently in the white hotel but can captivate on any stage. That mixture of charisma and sound causes the scene to part away and induce a state of mild hypnosis in the observer. That they are neither here nor there, that they are not merely at a club watching Silverwingkiller on stage but in some nameless recess of the mind. A fractured collage of images and sounds they may recognize yet are still so distant from their prying eyes. It’s that sense of dislocation, how it melds and shatter against the sound and fury of their heavier tracks, that makes them so great. 

There is a part of me tempted to claim that tonight was bigger than Silverwingkiller. That it stands to show not just how an excellent line-up and space can elevate a gig, but also just how gleaming a dark star Manchester's new electronic scene appears to be. But fundamentally, tonight was Silverwingkiller’s night. One that truly showcased why they’re one of the country's best live acts. It's not just because they're fast, or heavy, or charismatic on stage it’s something far harder to quantify. That feeling a truly great gig should leave you, where you seem to exit your body and surroundings for a moment, when every other aspect of your existence seems pointless other than what's on stage before you. That sense of being in another place entirely, as if your whole state of existence at that moment is at the beck and call of those standing before you, smashing and screaming. I’ve seen Silverwingkiller many times before, but this was the first time they induced that state in me. A sense that their music is unlike anything else right now, a sound caught between firewalls, locked away in glitched out music videos. stuck between manifestos in zip files. long buried in the corners of neocity sights abandoned by their creators. They are something new and unique, difficult to quantify, yet seeing them live leaves most other bands sounding obsolete. They’re quite simply the best live band in the city.

Photography By: Tom Richards