Concert review: Slift at Asheville Music Hall

“Set the controls to the earth's surface!” 

That’s the first command issued on Slift’s 2020 sci-fi opus, Ummon, which earned the power trio from Toulouse, France, a seat in the intergalactic kingdom of stoner rock. From that bold directive, the lyrics dive straight into ancestral stones, fire, titans, swords, gods… and then from there, well, only Slift knows where it's taking us. But for sure, a lot of people at its Oct. 21 performance at Asheville Music Hall were going along for the ride. 

We can wax and wane on Slift’s elemental makeup — psych rock, krautrock, prog, space metal, its devotion to science fiction (the band’s name comes from the sci-fi novel La Zone du Dehors by Alain Damasio) — or I can just say that brothers Jean (guitar/vocals) and Rémi Fossat (bass), alongside Canek Flores (drums) unleashed a white-hot bombardment of spine-twisting, mind-bending doom-cratered rock on the venue. 

From the point of ignition on Ummon’s title track, Jean’s distortion cleaved the room like the aforementioned titan’s sword and heralded what was to be a jaw-dropping ride of volcanic, meteoric surges and deep-space free-falls, all set to strobing projections of moon giants, ice planets, mind tunnels, and space-time rifts. Every last bit of it was amazing.

I came across Slift by chance, habitually poring over Asheville’s live music listings and drawn in by curiosity and some excellent YouTube videos (see “LEVITATION Sessions,” the band’s performance inside the metal silo of a giant high-voltage electron microscope). But as a newbie, I was in the minority. Most everyone else, it seemed, knew exactly who Slift was, and had been waiting an eon to see them live.

 In Asheville on its first U.S. tour, Slift rewarded the wait, journeying through stamina-testing krautrock rhythms, Hendrix-tinted guitar fissures, and thundering undulations of electronic waves. Loud and crunchy as it is, this music is not sludge. Slift is precise; its music architectural — as in “Hyperion,” where the band patiently constructed a rhythmic march, building tension and storing energy until Rémi’s bass blew the bottom out — opening a portal of distortion I could feel in my hair. 

The fans up front responded with delirium, arms flung in the air against the striations of light and sound, but they weren’t alone in their exuberance; Slift gave its all as well. As far from shoegaze standstill as you can get, the brothers Fossat leapt, arched, flailed, and were tossed seemingly by the whorls and twisting wormholes of their own creation. Look away for a moment and you could wonder how on Earth (or any other planet) three people could make this much noise, then look back at the stage, see how hard Slift goes, and you know. 

This all would be insane if it wasn’t so well done. The trio threw everything into the 15-plus minute “Citadel on a Satellite,” a piece with so many turns and sections that it took me 20 minutes the next day with my setlist and Google to figure out it wasn’t two songs. The anthemic punk opening of “Lions, Tigers, and Bears” fell away layer by layer into a chugging bass/drum rhythm as Jean fused and fissured electronic noise from a stand of pedals and modulators, then dropped right back into the punk verse some 12 minutes later. 

Heavy metal sincerity can be burdensome, and it’s sometimes easy to snicker at lyrics about wizards or magic worlds, but Slift’s thorough embrace of science fiction is wholly convincing. Like the illustrations of comics artist Phillip Caza, whose art graces Ummon’s album cover, the band’s music rises to meet the stories its members are telling. “Altitude Lake” opened with a semi-chanted lyric about a traveler who arrives “at the edge, where the world ends, contemplating misty lands,” and the Asheville Music Hall crowd was fully committed to the journey. 

Slift showed that, once you have come out openly as a sci-fi stoner rock band, there really is nowhere in the universe you can’t go. Of the shows I’ve seen this year, this may be the one I’d most like to see again.

Setlist

Ummon – 5:46
It’s Coming – 8:29
Citadel on a Satellite – 15:33
Hyperion – 4:27
Altitude Lake – 5:53
Lions, Tigers, and Bears – 16:50

(Photo by Titouan Massé)