Gutalax

There are probably easier ways to spend a Monday night in Valencia than standing inside Peter Rock while four Czech lunatics turn the place into a high-speed celebration of bodily fluids, toilet humour and industrial-strength grindcore. But where’s the fun in easy?

On Monday 12 October, Gutalax roll into Peter Rock Club as part of an eight-date Spanish assault that begins in Portugalete on October 9 and tears through Logroño, Barcelona, Valencia, Murcia, Granada, Sevilla and Madrid before somebody presumably remembers that the human body was never designed for this much blastbeat.

For the uninitiated, Gutalax are not your average metal band. Formed in Křemže in the Czech Republic in 2009, they have spent the best part of two decades turning goregrind into something resembling the bastard offspring of a filthy toilet cubicle, a malfunctioning chainsaw and the world's most unhinged pub singalong. Their own description of the music as “gore ’n’ roll” pretty much nails the crime scene: savage grindcore rhythms, ridiculous humour, guttural vocals and riffs designed to hit you somewhere between the chest and the digestive system.

And yes, the imagery is exactly what you're thinking. Gutalax shows have developed their own peculiar visual language, with fans regularly turning up in white protective suits, carrying toilet brushes, waving bog roll and generally behaving as though the local plumbing industry has been appointed artistic director. Recent reports from their live shows have even documented portable toilets being crowd-surfed. At this point, conventional concert etiquette has clearly been flushed down the nearest drain.

Which makes Peter Rock a particularly interesting place to unleash them. The Valencia date lands in the middle of the Spanish run, immediately after Barcelona and before Murcia, and the band are billed with an additional guest for the Peter Rock show. Doors open at 8pm, with the music scheduled to start at 8:30pm.

Peter Rock has built a reputation for packing a remarkably broad range of live music into its Valencia programming, but Gutalax represent a rather different kind of proposition. The club's intimate setting means this isn't going to be one of those enormous festival stages where the band appears somewhere on the horizon behind a sea of phone screens. This is close quarters. Approximately 200-capacity territory. Sweat-on-the-walls territory. The sort of room where a grindcore breakdown doesn't so much happen to you as physically arrive at your address.

And Gutalax aren't coming to Valencia for a polite cultural exchange. Their catalogue includes Shit Beast, Shit Happens! and The Shitpendables, alongside splits and releases that have established them as one of the more recognisable names in the European goregrind scene. Their songs come at you with the subtlety of a toilet door being kicked off its hinges, while the band's deliberately absurd presentation stops the whole thing disappearing into the usual black-clad seriousness that can sometimes surround extreme metal.

That combination is the secret weapon. Gutalax understand that extreme music can be genuinely fucking heavy without taking itself too seriously.

So expect riffs that sound like machinery being fed through a woodchipper, drums operating at speeds that should probably require a licence, vocals from somewhere deep inside the human sewer system and a crowd increasingly convinced that toilet brushes are perfectly legitimate concert accessories.

The Spanish tour itself is impressively relentless: Portugalete on October 9, Logroño on October 10, Barcelona on October 11, Valencia on October 12, then a short breather before Murcia, Granada, Sevilla and Madrid bring the whole diseased procession to a close on October 18.

For Valencia, however, October 12 is the date to circle in something suitably unpleasant. Peter Rock. Gutalax. Monday night. Bring your earplugs. Bring your sense of humour. Bring whatever protective equipment you feel is appropriate. And if somebody walks past you carrying a toilet brush like a festival flag, don't ask questions. You already know what happened.

For tickets and more information: Peter Rock