We have been accepted into Metal to the Masses 2018 competition to win a slot at Bloodstock 2018.. watch this space, first gig to be at the exchange in April, date to be announced shorty.

https://www.facebook.com/events/338978149843208/

We will be joined by the fantastic HUT, Bloody Elle and Dead Kids guests to play The Thunderbolt on 14th Feb.

when the Locust had eaten so much of everything
that its stomach was bulbous as a dog's head,
it flew drunk and upside down,
banging its belly against the sky,
its little legs agitating like strips of machine noise.

It was now so terribly fat
that its wings could bear no more.
and it tumbled, quite unexpectedly, as if a carcass, from the air.
Plummeting through the wind,
thrashing out at the tree blossom
it plopped onto the forecourt like a calcified eye.

The ground was cold.
The locust hissed indignation,
flailing its legs up at the clouds.

When it had righted itself
it began probing about in a square of orange light
emanating from a small window,
that flickered up high like an ember,
sooted with opiate fumes.

A melody,
entangled as though an animal in plucked strings
was mewling the same notes
over and over and over,
while a sound of laughter and sobbing
drifted underneath the door
driving smoke plumes out with it
into the brittle frost.

The locust chewed its feet
and spat upon itself.
It dragged its body in anger up the door frame
and, entering the lockhole,
it mustered the last of its appetite,
to chew upon the bolt.
Digging in its teeth,
the door came open
voicing trauma with its hinges.

In the locust went.

The flesh rippled like acetate
in moribund light.
Upon the parlour floor
bodies ran
top to tail
constricting and releasing
- limbs like fish
running through porus air.

Stained walls bit the smoke and musk.
Sweat hung in a veil.
And ever a nightmare became a dream.

The locust clicked its teeth.
Twitching its abdomen
it scurried along a lotus stem
which lay prostrate in the fragments of a decanter.

In the corner,
a face with china lips and eyes
turned then swiveled back,
the varnish of its countenance bearing segments of light
that moved across its features,
as the motor drove its neck from east to west.
A crack ran from its cheek
down into its body,
half of which had come away onto the floor.
The silk of its finery had withered
exposing inner mechanisms,
and its remaining arm rose and fell
upon an untuned dulcimer,
driving the room to nausea
with a trickle of sour music.

Powder hazed around the light bulb.
A body rolled over onto the next.
And a woman rose up from the darkness.

She slid out from the nexus,
her open robe trailing like a gasp of breath behind her,
and, with eyes that would not open,
she collapsed onto an ottoman
pulling a tumbler of dusty water from a small table.
Passing her mouth, she poured it upon herself
and fell unconscious
letting it rattle across the floor.

Voltage hummed in the walls.
The locust watched.

A hatch opened in the ceiling.
And from this a lens lowered down upon a spindle.
It rotated,
watched her for some time,
and then retracted.

Out came then
a metallic willow of rod and spring,
jointed, with a clamp upon its end,
that came together like a pincered hand.
Bearing a syringe
it cut a path through the frail light
extending from the ceiling as if endless,
until, when near, it twisted on an axis,
the needle became briefly lit by lamp glow
and from the centre of the parlour
issued a howl from the grinding menagerie,
as the point drove in through her spine
disgorging its elixir
till none stayed in the vial.

It receded.
It raised.
It withdrew across the space,
folding its joints
and vanishing once more behind a closed hatch.

Her head rolled back in her chair
her feet stamped under her linen
her eyes ran into her skull
her knuckles whitened to crustaceans upon the handrests.

And then it passed.
And she sat in the gloom wide-eyed.

Returning to the sinewed mobius,
hands began clasping at her ankles,
and she noticed then the aperture of the doorway
open unto the night.
Swaying on the balls of her feet
she stared at it
and ever a nightmare became a dream.

Kicking away fingers and palms
she placed her steps
between the angles of elbows and knees.

The locust clicked its tendons suddenly and looked up.
"Love me!" it screamed.
"For all the horror I have within me
from all the world that I have consumed
love me!"

But in that moment
an automaton hand hammered the dulcimer,
she heard nothing,
as with new found pace,
she trod upon the locust's carapace,
rupturing it,
pulping its stomach contents,
dragging its silent entrails
across the white of the lotus as she went.

Out in the urn of the night
she stood unmoving,
as a flower pressed thin by a decade of cloud.

From the parlour came a breath,
"goodbye number seven"
and she pushed the door behind her
condemning six of her ilk to fester.

Then, like the bloom of a peacock
she opened her arms
walking slowly down the steps.
And snow became thick in her hair.
And she saw her life's breath.
And she felt the cold gathering on her skin.
And she moved with full width into the world
howling at the ends of the cauterised stars.