Rolo Tomassi @ The Junction, York. 28th September 2008

It’s a Sunday night in the beautiful city of York all is silent in this historic place, until you head out of town through the city walls past the Railway Museum and to a pub where you will find the un-holy roar of Rolo Tomassi to destroy the ambiance.

I’ve seen them before on the same bill as This Town Needs Guns & I Was A Cub Scout (R.I.P.) and they blew me away and I became an instant fan of the raw yet tight brutal energy they had on stage. I danced the best I could and just stood with my jaw dropping for the rest of it. I just wasn’t ready for such an onslaught after the delightful TTNG and before the sweet IWACS, I got very excited and rushed to the merch stand only top be greeted by Eva the singer who had rushed from the stage and started selling stuff. The self titled EP on Holy Roar, which I’ve talked about before on here then got a lot of spins from me over the coming year. Now Rolo Tomassi are back with their debut album Hysterics, I will review this soon no doubt, but for tonight it’s their time…

When they hit the stage fresh faced and full of beans, they take over with some beastly noise. The band are tight and make each twist and turn with a flowing precision. People try to mosh, headbang or dance but its all so disjointed you have to jump at the chance when a piece takes you. There is no sleeping on the job with Rolo Tomassi. They lull you in with a false sense of calm with a passage of ambient keyboards and noise, before ripping the heart out of your body and jumping on it with a brutal joy and passion.

They played as nice mixture of new and old material; the EP tracks make people move so much as they are the more well known, Film Noir and Curby are a pure surge of energy right to your brain, the crowed go mad for that and something very strange happens for Curby, but more on that in a bit…

The new tunes from Hysterics are just brilliant I’m not to familiar with the names as yet, because the album only came out on Monday. The twists and turns are sublime, they really keep you on your toes, just when you think you have a groove they swipe it away from you and flip off on another tangent. Jazzy interludes serge into hardcore sugar rushes, with walls of guitar and stop start drumming, a spooky almost Transylvanian darkness features at times before Eva & James either scream like banshees with curdling blood drenched howls or sweet ghostly tones.

Now for the Curby madness: the room is fairly sparse, it is a Sunday night after all. There is plenty of room for the hardcore moshers to manuva and they really get into it at times. But for the final track some of them get together, lay on the floor, get on their knees and start a human pyramid. It starts small with three on the bottom then two and one as you would in a pyramid. But then Rolo break it down and say we can do better, and my god they do. I think there was five or six on the bottom and by the time it was built the pyramid reached the ceiling. I can safely say I have never seen a human pyramid at a gig. Amazing scenes!

Rolo Tomassi brings the tunes York brings the freaks…

Download some tasters from Hysterics here.

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