Veterans of a mid-80s underground scene that raised atonal, oppressive noise to a vital artform, Ut have retained their ability to unsettle and inspire more than 40 years after they first formed. And while this rare live outing, celebrating the reissue of their 1987 no-wave landmark In Gut’s House, might begin inauspiciously – with news that one of the trio, Nina Canal, can’t make the show, followed by some broken-string shenanigans – such mishaps are powerless to scupper the cyclone of noise that Sally Young and Jacqui Ham can still stir at will.
With Young’s monochordal riffing and Ham’s inspired, abrasive guitar-play intersecting and raising their din to Glenn Branca-esque heights, they’re intense tonight – volcanic, even. Backed by guest drummer Paul May, the duo are quickly playing at full tilt, and you sense those in the front rows might take a few steps back if they weren’t seated. There’s method to their cacophony, however, and hooks amid the catharsis.
The incantatory crawl of Big Wing finds Young invoking the molten depths of the blues, her howl as soulful and possessed as Iggy’s or Patti’s, while the ferocious gallop of Swallow pits Young’s staccato bursts of venomous twang against Ham’s wails. The latter’s unsettling streams of consciousness on a magnificent Stain are matched by the fiery, ugly/beautiful skronk of saxophonist Tim Hodgkinson, reprising the part he originally recorded 30-odd years ago.
Most thrillingly of all, the closing Sham Shack sees Ham on the drums, as the duo hammer out a lopsided post-punk funk that’s oddly poppy. Ut’s primal force was undersung and overshadowed by more accessible contemporaries such as Sonic Youth, but their brutalist dynamic has retained all its power, and is ripe for rediscovery.
