Tonight’s support band have pulled out at the last moment and that’s left a hole in the bill, but stepping up as a last minute replacement is the band’s tour manager Adriano Bartoccini. He also performs under the moniker MUDD, but tonight’s show is a pared-back affair that removes all the bells and whistles found on recent album Dead End Cunt Hou$e in favour of an acoustic performance. It’s pretty much a set comprised of new songs and some might say that’s a risky move for an impromptu appearance, yet years of busking in his native Italy have served Adriano well and he turns in a rugged set that brings to mind the second half of Led Zeppelin III as he attacks the strings with gusto and thumps the guitar’s body for rhythm. There’s a conversational quality to his singing that creates a bond between performer and audience, and one that is only strengthened when a cover of Sixto Rodriguez’s ‘Sugar Man’ closes the set. Sweet.

On the penultimate night of their current tour, masters of the riff Duel make a welcome appearance at The Craufurd Arms. It’s been a long tour that’s found the band leaving a trail of demolished stages (and a few popped eardrums, I dare say) in their wake, yet they show no signs of flagging and they hit the stage like the proverbial swirling maelstrom. There’s no fancy introductions and the band’s sudden arrival makes them all the more impactful; like a bullet appearing between your eyebrows you don’t see the band until they hit you with opening track ‘Wave Of The Fire’. It’s been a long road from Austin, Texas and Duel haven’t come to take prisoners, that’s precisely the attitude with which they operate and the preceding dates have turned them into a well-oiled machine. There’s no time wasted on banal between song banter, the band favouring a quick fire, punchy attack that finds each song connecting like a well-aimed blow to the cranium.

Delivering a pugnacious brand of doom metal, Duel have riffs that sound as if they have been dredged up from the depths of Texan swamps, while the rhythm section make a ferocious tag team; the drummer in particular seems intent on pulverising his kit to dust. Looking like a grizzly bear drunk on honey or a hillbilly high on moonshine (take your pick) vocalist Tom Frank cuts an impressive figure and serves up a suitably grandiloquent performance with a whisky-soaked croak. In fact, it is the band’s three-point harmonies that lift them above the pack and helps turn songs such as ‘Chaos Reigns’ into musical bulldozers that crush all in their path. Yet, even when the band switch down a gear they are no less powerful, but at whatever tempo they operate Duel deliver a brand of metal that is devoid of any frills (although big on thrills) and is boiled down to its purest distillation until all that’s left is pure molten metal, and that’s something for which we should all be thankful.

Duel Set List:

1. Wave Of The Fire
2. Devil
3. Children Of The Fire
4. Chaos Reigns
5. Electricity
6. Satan’s Invention
7. Pyro
8. Anchor
9. Strike And Disappear
10. Fallacy
11. Fears Of The Dead
12. Black Magic Summer
13. Locked Outside

Adriano Bartoccini Set List

1. Ashes
2. Perhaps It’s Fair
3. Keeping Faith
4. 7 Years
5. Bonnie
6. The Art Of Acting
7. Sugar Man