Guest review by The Underground venue manager Lee Barber
The blasphemous Christian Music return like the resurrection with their latest sacrificial offering, a concoction of compelling and calculated chaos borne in the dark depths of the creative hub that is Josh Baker’s mind.
Building on the well received first EP Feed The Monkey, released last year, Baker has worked tirelessly to construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct a band perfect for his goals and ambitions in moving Christian Music forward beyond the realms of Stoke’s music scene – but in such a quest he has also found himself becoming a vital part of revitalising a scene which, following the pandemic, has at times struggled to rekindle the burning flames that was Stoke’s pre-Covid music community.
The seeds of the scene are in 2024 going to be laid down by such bands as Christian Music, as they bring shock and chaos and calamity onto the stage and somehow find unique ways to stamp those wild sounds down into recordings. The vision of Christian Music however is not one of simply getting onto a stage and causing destruction; whether that actually happens or not is irrelevant, it’s merely one small part of the bigger picture we have as yet only been given a glimpse of.
That burning energy Christian Music have is there for all to see with latest offering Marimba-Tragic Death Cult, piercing guitars, ruthless drums forming the perfect foundation for Baker’s brutally sharp vocals, and as Baker himself explains,
‘Much like ‘Blade: Trinity’ (2004), which the track is of course based on, Marimba-Tragic Death Cult is unapologetically a complete mess. Created in isolation inside a cold garage* amongst dust, gardening tools and a power saw, the screams and squeals in the track derive from a genuine place of loathing and hatred for anyone outside of the hellish garage-temple.’
Baker is very open about his roots in Stoke music, recognising it as the creative hot spot it always has been, whether that has gone largely unnoticed by the rest of the country or not. As a staff member at The Underground music venue in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, Baker has been given the opportunity to soak up all the live music he can, where he has been able to see many new and established bands up close, and clarify his views on the current state of British music.**
Marimba-Tragic Death Cult is released in the build up to Christian Music’s anticipated EP, scheduled for a Spring release, and if this track is anything to go by, then Stoke music might just find itself forming an important scene the rest of the country will want to be part of. The sleeping giant that is Stoke’s music scene, it would appear, is going to be well and truly woken in 2024.
*Baker admits it wasn’t actually that cold.
**He even gets to clean up sick out of the urinals.
Released January 31, 2024, listen to Christian Music’s Marimba-Tragic Death Cult here:
