The Gospel: – La Belle Angele – Edinburgh – Scotland 4th May 2025 Gig Review
5th May 2025I’d heard the rumors. Everyone had. Whispers passed hand-to-hand across venues like contraband: “Dark.” “Intense.” “Transformative.” All the usual lazy superlatives music journalists toss around when they’ve run out of useful language. I almost didn’t come. Thought it would be another group of men in black posturing with fuzz pedals and reverb. But I was wrong.
So wrong.
La Belle Angele doesn’t advertise itself. It crouches under Cowgate like it’s trying not to be seen, like it knows what it holds inside. Tonight, it felt more like a mouth than a building. And we walked straight into it.
The room was already wrong when I entered. The lights were too dim, the air too thick, too many people standing too still. You could sense that something had happened, or was about to, and that it would cost more than time. And then The Gospel appeared.
They didn’t walk on. They didn’t get announced. They were just there. No movement at first. Just shapes in low light, instruments held like ritual objects. When the sound came, it wasn’t a beginning. It was a conversion.
Jimmy doesn’t sing. He doesn’t scream either. He extracts. Each word sounds like it was buried under concrete and dragged out with fingernails. During “Lord Can You Hear Me”, the reaction from the room was something I haven’t seen in over a decade of covering Edinburgh’s mess of a music scene. No phones. No chatter. Just sweat and breath and bodies. A couple near me started full-on fucking against the wall during the Like A Prayer cover. Not passionately. Desperately. Like they were being moved rather than choosing to move.
The sound is hard to pin down, and trying to describe it feels like giving shape to smoke. But imagine early Swans resurrected in the damp guts of a Mancunian ruin—fed on iron filings, godlessness, and black mold. The guitarist—Saffire, maybe 3ft 2″ at most—but she coaxed out tones that shouldn’t exist outside night terrors. Precise, unnatural. Like she was etching runes into the air. Charis, the bassist, meanwhile, played lines so low I swear my molars shifted. Their patterns were tight, clinical almost, but with something loose underneath. Something is waiting to slip.
The percussionists Sinead and Danni didn’t show off. They didn’t need to. Every strike felt like it had been considered hours in advance. They played with time like it was clay—stretched it, broke it, rebuilt it wrong on purpose.
There was no “performance”, not in the usual sense. No banter. No winks to the crowd. Just tension. Undisturbed.
The Gospel isn’t reinventing anything. They’re not trying to. That’s not the point. What they are doing is giving themselves completely to something most bands only flirt with: real, unfiltered darkness. Not Halloween makeup and vintage horror samples. Something physical. Uncomfortable. Something that fucks with your sense of self in slow, deliberate ways. They don’t blur the line between pleasure and pain—they erase it.
And in that space, you lose track of what’s performance and what’s happening to you.
The final piece didn’t end. It withdrew. Left a hole in the air where it had been. No one moved. The room didn’t erupt—it just exhaled. Then people clapped, but only because they needed to do something.
Outside, Cowgate looked the same, but it wasn’t. We weren’t. I walked three streets before I realized I’d forgotten how to hold a conversation. Someone brushed my arm, and I flinched.
The Gospel continues their pilgrimage across the UK this month. If you go—if you let yourself go—don’t expect to be entertained. Don’t expect catharsis. Expect to be taken apart quietly.
One day, when La Belle Angele gives out, cracks open, sinks into itself—I doubt the stone will forget. That night sank in deep. Something was there, something awful and beautiful, humming just beneath the skin of things. It clung to the walls like breath. Even the granite didn’t know what to do—bow down or bare its throat.
