Melt Yourself Down - Live at the New Empowering Church (2014) [Hi-Res]

Finally! The horn-wailing, mic-swinging, percussion-overload, call-and-response explosiveness of the Melt Yourself Down experience is captured on plastic in all its sweat-drenched fury, on a live album to be released especially for Record Store Day.

Recorded at The New Empowering Church in London Fields, in late November 2013, it’s a raw and ragged document of sweet sonic violence in a small room, a strobe-lit snapshot. There is dancing, there is crowd-surfing, there is emancipation. This is Melt Yourself Down laid bare and blowing hard. Warts and all, captured for you. Just nine hundred precious copies for the world, housed in a new, day-glo variant of the already iconic MYD artwork. Catch ‘em if you can.

Twisting jazz, punk, funk and Afrobeat into strange and brilliant new shapes, Melt Yourself Down are lead from the front by Kushal Gaya, who delivers here with a finger-jabbing religious fervour usually associated with old time revivalist preachers admonishing their flock of sinful backsliders. “The house band from hell,” live from the house of God.

Like bottle rockets fired into a tropical storm or a dizzying dawn dance down the dark back alleys of Lagos/Cairo/Tangiers/London, Live At The New Empowering Church finds Melt Yourself Down at their feverish, futuristic and thrusting best. Feel those exotic rhythms. Ponder the hypnotic/enigmatic lyrical mantras. Enjoy a delirious, muscular workout. As Pitchfork put it MYD deliver “a bazaar sax smackdown that has an iron in every furnace of global psychedelia, smelted into a structure of tungsten strength.”