Bell Witch/One Leg One Eye review: Brilliant boundary-pushing from Seattle metallers and Lankum's Ian Lynch 

At the Academy in Dublin, Bell Witch got experimental with a single 80-minute track, while Lynch unleashed the drones from his solo sojourn 

Bell Witch from Seattle played the Academy in Dublin. 

Bell Witch/ One Leg One Eye, Academy 2, Dublin, ★★★★☆

There was no need for a setlist as 'doom metal' duo Bell Witch materialised in the stygian darkness of Dublin’s subterranean Academy 2 venue. The Seattle pairing of Dylan Desmond (bass) and Jesse Shreibman (drums, keyboards) were here to play just a single track — an 80-minute, largely instrumental meditation on life and death with the Games of Thrones-esque title of Future’s Shadow Part One: The Clandestine Gate.

It’s a mouthful of a moniker, and this was a bulldozer of a gig. Spiralling from a delicate opening to pummelling barrages of bass, the band’s vibrations packed a literal gut punch, sending waves of sludgy noise shuddering through the sold-out crowd.

Bell Witch is technically a heavy metal band. But their sound is experimental and tenuously connected to Judas Priest or AC/DC — inspirations for The Clandestine Gate include the writings of nihilist German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and then the glacial sci-fi of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. For those about to rock… you were probably in the wrong room.

  Their choice of support artist confirmed the avant-garde character of their music. Ian Lynch is a Dublin musician best known as a member of Lankum, the Dublin folk band shortlisted for last year’s Mercury Music Prize and winner of the Choice Music Prize for the Best Irish Album of 2023.

Ian Lynch of Lankum has a solo project titled One Leg One Eye. 

Lankum, like Bell Witch, stands at the furthest limits of genre. With his side project, One Leg Black Eye, Lynch goes over the edge. Mournful and mysterious, his 2022 album And Take The Black Worm With Me is traditional music for the apocalypse. That sense of ever-rising doom was wonderfully conjured at Academy 2.

“I am the first God of the people,” declared a sample Irish voice at the start of Lynch’s winningly extreme set. It was quickly swallowed up by a wall of droning noises that suggested uilleann pipes parping at the side of a volcano.

Lynch recorded One Leg One Eye on the go. Some of the material was assembled in his bedroom. One tune was laid down in an abandoned factory where his father once worked. Often, the feeling was of music in conversation with ghosts. That spectral quality came rushing through strongly on Bold and Undaunted Youth. It was his take on 'The Newry Highwayman', an 18th-century folk ballad about a vagabond’s life and death previously recorded by both The Dubliners and Liam Clancy.

Intense and enigmatic, it was the perfect appetite-whetter for Bell Witch. Partly obscured behind the rows of metallers up front, the headliners took up the baton from Lynch with an expansive and immersive performance.

Bell Witch’s name has spread beyond the black t-shirt set. The Clandestine Gate was praised by hipster motherlode Pitchfork and heralded by US culture website Vulture for its “massive expanse of swelling organ drones, beguiling poetry, and triumphant riffs”.

 That they would find an audience outside of metal is no mystery. Loud but plaintive, their Academy show was a slow-burn blockbuster that hit like a rock opera rising up out of the underworld.