Godsleep returned to Paris for the third time with very little interest in easing themselves or the audience into the evening gently. Outside, the city was melting under the hottest temperatures of the year so far. Inside the thankfully air-conditioned Supersonic Records, the Greek band had more immediate concerns, chiefly delivering a thorough sonic beating to the tightly packed crowd.
Attempting to neatly categorize Godsleep is a pointless exercise: their music pulls from stoner rock, psychedelia, progressive rock, punk and straight-up heavy metal, often within the same song. Yet the blend never feels academic or overly self-conscious, what emerges instead is a dense, physical sound that seems to absorb entire decades of underground rock music before hurling them back outward at overwhelming volume. There are traces of seventies hard rock, nineties desert rock and post-punk abrasion colliding constantly throughout the set, but the end result belongs entirely to them.
Frontwoman Amie Makris remains the band’s focal point, bringing genuine punk fury to the molten riff-work laid down by guitarist John Tsoumas. Beneath them, bassist Fedonas Ktenas and drummer Dennis Panagiotidis form a rhythm section heavy enough to physically shift the atmosphere inside the room.
The set closes with the epic “Ded Space,” nearly ten minutes of controlled escalation moving between industrial psychedelia, post-punk dissonance and galloping metallic propulsion. By the end, the audience looked equal parts exhausted and exhilarated. A crushing set from a band that continues to carve out its own strange corner of the heavy underground.
