Zeal & Ardor at The Fleece in Bristol on Friday 30 November 2018
Zeal & Ardor will be there at The Fleece in Bristol on Friday 30 November 2018
We followed them from Reading Festival to Roadburn, from The Great Escape to Primavera Sound. This month they released their second album and played to packed audiences in London and at Download Festival. Now we are stoked to finally have Zeal & Ardor and their experimental blues/black metal for their first Bristol headline!
Word of mouth is crucial for a band like Zeal & Ardor, a bedroom project-turned-juggernaut that rose to hyped-up prominence in a matter of months and is sustained by fan interest instead of major label machinery. Swiss/American band leader Gagneux possesses an incredibly powerful, versatile voice, as well as a thoroughly original sound and the chops to pull it all together seamlessly. After all, he’s got the Devil on his side.
As a result of a racist comment, he stumbled onto a winning combination: a purposefully unholy conflagration of African-American spirituals, chain gangs songs, the blues, and Satanic black metal that drew lines between Scandinavia and the Delta, summoning both the blasphemous evils of the North and the bloodstained history of the South. Radicalis Records in Switzerland offered to release the project’s debut full-length, ‘Devil Is Fine’, in 2016 (with the Netherlands’ Reflections Records handling a limited vinyl release), and things snowballed from there.
Since the release of this breakthrough album, he has been the subject of much attention in the metal world, ranging from fawning praise to damning grumbles about trends and “fake” metal. As a biracial Swiss-American—born to a white Swiss father and black American mother—he falls so far outside the narrow profile of a stereotypical black metal musician that he’s even been accused of “appropriating” black metal, which is even funnier when one considers where all heavy metal and rock ‘n’ roll came from in the first goddamn place: black musicians!
Second album ‘Stranger Fruit’, is a masterful blend of the darkest Delta blues, soaring gospel, and ice- storms of blackened metal. On this album, Gagneux has refined his genre-spanning sound into an utterly cohesive signature, one that transitions seamlessly between its elements and embraces even more outside influences, electronic and organic alike. ‘Devil Is Fine’ was a welcome surprise, but ‘Stranger Fruit’ is a full-fledged manifesto down to the provocative title that recalls jazz icon Billie Holiday’s unforgettable, smokey tribute to the Black lives stolen on Southern soil. On ‘Stranger Fruit’, Zeal & Ardor has found its soul.
Servants, join us.
TICKETS ARE £15.68 INCLUDING TRANSACITON FEE