So you're standing in everyone's favourite Kings Cross shithole, and this wild-eyed dude is crawling over the monitors at the front, and it's like he's battling with the noise that surrounds him. He's already broken two microphones - whirling them around with seasoned abandon or just hurling them at the floor, one after the other. He's on his third, but even that claps out after a while, and fuck me - the dude just keeps on screaming, and I'm damned if the whole room can't still hear him, triumphantly pushing the guitar noise into the background while he screams and screams and just keeps on fucking screaming, mic or no mic. This guy's a mentalist. But he knows exactly what he's doing.

And you think to yourself:

This is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

Your intrepid reviewer was pre-warned some months back that Eden Maine are violently, inconceivably heavy. What we weren't told is how much melody, intelligence, and true, real, backbreaking emotion, and how many ideas, all lurk beneath the surface of this ear-shattering shitstorm. They open like Trail Of Dead or Billy fucking Mahonie, stares fixed on their guitars as a pendulous, restrained ripple of melody wafts through the venue. No-one's deceived, we all know what's coming; we all know this apparent lull can only precede an aural assailment of the most violent nature.

But as Eden Maine's singer lets rip, and the plucked, seesawing opening strains give way to an eruption of thunderous bass - even as their demented vocalist lurches and staggers around the room, abandoning the stage and filling the floor as he wreaks vocal and physical havoc, the melody that anchors his explosive behaviour flourishes all the more. A sense of desperation permeates Eden Maine entirely; the singer's unhinged performance and the flood of eloquent, epic guitar noise all seem born of genuine despair and violence and anguish - something that one might take for granted, until you compare them to the myriad of average chancers who scream because That's What Hardcore Singers Do. At times you get the sense that their singer screams because whatever intolerable, undefined emotion he's struggling to express doesn't translate into English, and by screaming, the inadequacy of his words will stay smothered within the blizzard of emphatic, passionate bedlam that Eden Maine deliver. Y'might say they let the music do the talking.

Where other hardcore bands choose to up the ante and just batter their crowds with a devastating wall of impenetrable noise, Eden Maine are able to do that and still hypnotise and bewilder with a wrenching, exquisite torrent of fervent beauty and fury and despair that defies description or explanation. They could be one of the most important things to emerge from the underground metal scene in years. Go and see them while your ears can still take the onslaught.

Photo by Cat Spalding at plastic-creep photos.