This is the first time W&H have touched down at Glasgow's annual MusicWorks event, but hopefully it won't be the last. A super-sussed week-long festival, it concentrates primarily on showcasing young and unsigned bands from the locality (and beyond) and presents gigs in many of the famous city's best small venues.
Nice'n' Sleazy is an excellent below-stairs club on Sauchiehall Street. The vibe is friendly and positive and a credit to Dicelines Records, whose band Driverdown are headlining tonight's gig. Much more about them later, but first up are VIVA STEREO, who are a moody-lookin' buncha honchoes with a dark-eyed singer who reminds us they have an album out: "available tonight for a fiver - a fuckin' fiver! How great is that?"
Fair point. And, while your reviewer must confess he didn't reach into his pocket for it on the night, certainly if the live version of VIVA STEREO are anything to go by, they're onto something. For one thing, it's a brave band who choose to come onstage in the slipstream of Magazine's immortally great "Secondhand Daylight", but to then refuse to be dwarfed by it is some achievement.
Having read through the press blurb about VS, your reviewer was expecting a band from the great Glaswegian tradititon of the Primals and JAMC, but what he hears is something entirely different. The sound is pin sharp and effective, you can actually hear the interplay between the two guitarists (jangle to scree and all points in between) and the bassist lurking in the far corner adds some early '80s funkiness of the Gang Of Four/ John Foxx variety.
Unfamiliarity with the material ensures I can't present a more detailed appraisal staright off and I initially wasn't so sure about the use of an (admittedly fairly mutant) drum machine, but Viva Stereo have bite and intrigue on their side and do the decent thing by dedicating their set to the late John Peel. Good sorts. We shall be hearing more from them, methinks.
The vibe dissipates somewhat with the arrival of ORDINARYSON. Apart from the similarity with nu-Mods The Ordinary Boys, their name is also well chosen as they soon shoot themselves in the collective foot with a half-hour set of dreary over-familiarity.
It gives your reviewer no satisfaction whatsoever to decimate a band scrambling around in the lower foothills of this precarious music biz mountain range, but sadly with Ordinaryson we cannot let them prevail. Their songs are from the ultra-pedestrian, no-chorus, two-chord strum handbook; they have the stage presence of lumpy custard and the fact your reviewer's mind wanders to what he intends to do in Edinburgh if the weather's good the following day (an ascent of Arthur's Seat sounds good) is an indication of how easily you can switch off in Ordinaryson's company.
Their new single is apparently called "War Here" and they announce it with some pride, but I'm damned if I can retrieve it from the lumpen indieness that's oozing from the stage. Sorry lads, don't call us an' all that.
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Headliners DRIVERDOWN, though, leave us in no doubt they are the evening's star attraction. Recent debut album "Getting It Out The Way" was a mature, gripping first salvo and one that keeps needling its' way back on this writer's stereo months after the event, and tonight they proceed to again take the bull by the horns during an impassioned and all-too-brief half hour onstage.
Although there is minimal usage of DAT, the live Driverdown experience eschews some of the trip-hoppy elements of the band's hypnotic incarnation on record and brings the guitars to the fore. The darkly effective atmosphere remains intact, though, as they rip through album highlights such as the claustrophobic, Muse-style mantra of "Drown Them Out Instead" and the swirling rhythmic attack of "The First Day."
All the band's four members make their presence felt. Attractive, foxy-haired singer Kelly Robertson is the obvious focal point, and she performs with the assurance of a younger, slightly less bitchy Shirley Manson. Guitarist Jon McKellan is the nonchalent songwriting genius and gently-spoken 'tween songs, though the wired violence he tears from his Gibson SG during the burning rubber riffage of "Left Me Cold" is impressive, as is the way he trades sneery call'n'response lead vox with Kelly. Drummer Omar Khan, meanwhile, provides dependable muscle, while Jon's bassist bro Graeme growls away like JJ Burnel after several plates of neeps and tatties and the fact I don't hate him for playing a five-string bass proves he's doing something right.
They seal the deal with the furious, ever-circling menace of "The Collapse" and its' deathly kiss-off line "I feel a pulse, but still no life/ And then give her away." The hairs on the back of W&H'S neck have barely settled when we have to observe the last bus-o-meter and scarper just as Driverdown are ending what has been a cataclysmically good set with a new song. It's already sounding great as we head out into a sensurround of waiting taxis and punters spilling out of pubs.
Tonight, then, was merely a brief, but entirely captivating foray into the strength and depth to be discovered at Glasgow's Music Works. Hopefully next year we'll be back for a larger helping, but you'll surely be on better terms with both Driverdown and Viva Stereo before that date rolls around. Mark my words on that.
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