Chrome Hoof launch their new album 'Crush Depth' at Hackney's Bocking Street Warehouse. Tom Jeffreys braves the heat.
When I first saw Chrome Hoof – as part of a collaboration with oddball performance artist Marcus Coates at the Coronet in 2009 – they blew my mind. This time round, it's my body that feels the impact, and not entirely in a good way.
Bocking Street Warehouse is the venue for the launch of their new album, 'Crush Depth', an album that sees Chrome Hoof take their unique funk/disco/metal thing, load it onto a sparkly little cart and gallop off into a shiny futuristic sunset.
Andrew Weatherall warms up an already rather feverish crowd with a set of intense, tawdry, ever-building house. It's a masterclass in perpetual crescendo: rising, resting, rising, without ever peaking. The summit is clearly reserved for the Hoof.
And yet, already the problems of the night are becoming clear, and really it's the venue that causes them. It's absolutely rammed, and savagely hot. You can barely move, and within seconds are dripping with sweat, squashed up against myriad hipsters, each trying to carve out a little room, each failing. £4 for a can of Kronenbourg means refreshment is to be taken sparingly. In short, the whole experience is vaguely unpleasant.
Chrome Hoof are of course amazing. Interspersing favourites from 2007's 'Pre-Emptive False Rapture' with new tracks from 'Crush Depth' they show both that that they're seriously moving on and that they haven't changed a bit. As keyboard/synth/sampler guru, Emmett Elvin said when we interviewed him a while back, “It's always evolving. From chrome, all the way to chrome – and back again.” They're still Chrome Hoof – weird and funky, relentless and ever-so-slightly terrifying – but if anything the new tracks are even wilder, and more expansive. Their big robot ram thing seems to have got significantly sleeker too.
By the time the Hoof clip-clop triumphantly from the stage, to go and munch on gilded hay or whatever it is they do, Bocking Street Warehouse has become practically unbearable. Even popping outside for a cigarette is a mission in itself, and by the time we get into the fresh air we can't face going in again. Anyway, we've seen what we came for – Chrome Hoof. And they ruled.
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