Kill the Vultures

Kill the Vultures from Minneapolis land in Italy, specifically in Bologna for the fourth time, and confirm themselves as one of the most significant acts on the American underground scene.

Their standout trait and greatest strength is the way they fuse furious, apocalyptic hip-hop rhymes with backing tracks that are always disorienting, sometimes cinematic in effect, sometimes flavoured with funk-metal, making the whole thing both jarring and fresh. For now they may well remain tucked away in their own hidden corner a little longer, but this ensemble will still be talked about decades from now as one of those singular musical hybrids that are so rare these days. In the meantime, we get to enjoy them in this stripped-down form, with just Alexei Moon Casselle aka Crescent Moon on the mic, and behind the machines and the beats the enigmatic Anatomy, who looks like he stepped straight out of Californian punk band Rocket from the Crypt, with that distinctly late-'50s look of his.

They open with a couple of tracks from their new album, "Ecce Beast", released in early 2009: the single "14th St. Ritual", packed with horns held for dear life, and the noir-song worthy of a Raymond Chandler story with the unmistakable title "The Big Sleep" — in short, you couldn't ask for a better start. They continue with the excellent, bouncy new track "Walk on Water", weaving it all together, between one quip and another from the singer to the packed crowd at the Locomotiv, with tracks from their two previous albums. A vicious, driving version of "Dirty Hands"; by popular demand, the stunning jazzy little march "Moonshine", with its existentialist, misanthropic lyrics, a nervy "Spider's Eyes", all taken from the manifesto album "The Careless Flame", released in 2006, a record that confirmed these guys as among the finest interpreters of a rediscovered sensitivity for words set to sounds of the most varied origin — a pairing as successful as few others in this particular moment in music history, one in which bands struggle to put forward a credible musical vision.

The crowd keeps getting fired up, and quite a lot too, for an all-in karaoke sing-along version of "Vultures", and for the hardcore song "7-8-9", where it sounds like the guitars of Minor Threat are duetting with the ghost of Public Enemy, moving on to the excellent, smoky "Good Intentions", all tracks taken from their first, self-titled album.

The surprise here is the total absence of any partners for Crescent Moon, and indeed, exhausted and out of breath, our man tires noticeably as he sings the anguished lyrics. There's clearly been some reshuffling within the band, but it hasn't dented their inspiration or the final result in the slightest. The music remains vicious, penetrating, and it's curious to spot metalhead looks in the crowd too—people who listen to stuff like Sunn O))) or Earth, drone-metal for the spirit; or the music of Kill the Vultures, rap music streaked with jazz and rhythmic backing tracks of considerable physical and spiritual weight. It's as if Unsane or the Swans had ditched their guitars and suddenly plunged headlong into hip-hop. That's exactly how they'd sound: numbing, smoky, New York to the core, and thoroughly apocalyptic. Like the version of "Beasts Of Burden", a magnificent piece of metal-metropolitan songcraft that closes the set, in the brief farewell encore that fittingly ends a performance that was alive, sublime, finally genuine and free of any filters or arrogance.

One of the best gigs of this cursed, freezing start to the year.

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