Youthmovies
MANCHESTER’S indie-beard population is out in force tonight, as are local oddballs, Cats In Paris.
Surely the city’s tallest band, the quartet’s often impenetrable compositions are riddled with squally violin, eccentrically parping keyboards, and ludicrous choreography.
Of course, they’re mesmerising; Belle And Sebastian as imagined by Ren And Stimpy, MGMT with added absurdity, and with more direction changes in one song than in Madonna’s entire career.
Next to shuffle onto the Night & Day’s helpfully lofty stage is half pint-sized Oregon songsmith, Adam Gnade. Snug as a bug in a rug inside is khaki anorak, he wields a smashed-to-pieces four string guitar while muffling his way through mostly incomprehensible spoken words vocals.
A cover of Johnny Cash’s The Man Comes Around is a notable highlight of an otherwise hit and miss and miss again set, which comes to a slightly premature end when his guitar lead gives up the ghost, presumably as nonplussed as the majority of the polite audience.
Youthmovies are an enigma. Although they’ve never quite nailed it on record, the plummy Oxford quintet are rarely less than immense in the live arena, awkward riffs somehow weaving and ricocheting into each other, while intense blasts of Sam Scott’s trumpet see his cheeks inflating to the Fast Show’s Jazz Club proportions.
Although dancing to them is nigh on impossible, there are frequent moments where the entire room seems to be bobbing like a group of hairy buoys in a storm, particularly Soandso & Soandso, which could almost make the peerless Anathallo fidget nervously such is its enormity.
There are still times where pretension gets the better of them, offering up walls of noise or lifeless slow motion segments that are completely at odds with the intricate – and far superior - stylings which they inevitably lurch into.
Definitely a band to tempt you out of the house, but not necessarily one to take back with you.
What did you think? Have your say.
Reviewed: Wed, 19 November, 2008
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