Gig Review – Yuck

This was originally published in the Nottingham Post.

My second gig review was meant to be about an indie bunch called Yuck. I did a bunch of research beforehand, even going so far as buying their albums so I could get my head round their sound before the big night.

I actually came to quite like them as a band, even after they lost their front-man, the bassist took over singing duties and they got a new lead player. The second album, minus the old lyricist is a bit more 70s and laid back than the grungey, feedback heavy, first one but both definitely have some merit.

However the night of the gig came, I grabbed my phone, jam packed with notes on the songs and the lyrics so I could list what order they’d been played in afterwards, and then this happened:

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I’ve listened to a lot of Yuck recently! Partly because I like them, mainly in preparation for tonight. Unfortunately when Polterghost took to the stage all the clever things I’d been thinking I’d write fell out of my head, because it was like all my favourite bands from the 90s had decided to siphon their wisdom into a little bloke with a beard.

They only played five or six tracks, but each of them was three or four minutes of intense pleasure, wrapped in alternative rock, with an added frisson of screeching overdrive. The three unassuming men donned guitar, bass and drumsticks respectively then threw a musical brick at you, which smashed you in the face and rebounded landing on your foot.

Moving from Swervedriver impersonating intricate melodies into scream-out-loud Rage Against the Machine-a-like choruses via the dark heart of Beaster era Sugar and even (strangely) through some of Avril Lavigne’s earlier tracks!?. They’ve done what a lot of recent bands have attempted and brought alternative rock back up to date and, hopefully, into fashion again. I would go so far as to say they may well be my new favourite band!

I think I’ll be adding anything Polterghost to my festive present list, but sadly they don’t actually seem to have any merchandise or music available at the moment. So maybe I’ll just send them a Christmas card to wish them well and ask them nicely to record some more songs.

Yuck were really very good, by the way!

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Gig Review – Everything Everything

Originally published on the Nottingham Post website. I actually did this review as a favour to a friend, who couldn’t make the gig. My only real mistake was taking a pen and paper to write on, when there would obviously be a lot of darkness and flashing lights.

I loved the gig and the band was something else, if you ever get the chance then go see them, they rocked.

Anyway, enough with all this blathering, here are the words.

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Like the theoretical subatomic particle he shares his name with, Jonathan Higgs seems to bounce around like he’s attempting to create new matter on stage. He flits between rock posturing, growling, angelic choristry and balladry. He owns the stage like a scaled down Henry Rollins in his prime, and makes Everything Everything a promising live prospect.

They kick off with a guitar heavy version of Suffragette Suffragette then blast through sixteen songs in less than an hour and a half. Briefly slowing down halfway through for a couple of down tempo tunes, then accelerating back into their first crescendo with Cough Cough, their latest single, to finish the main set. Then, much to the crowds’ delight, they round the encore off with Photoshop Handsome, just to show they can come up with two words for a song title.

You get the feeling that it wouldn’t matter to the band if they were playing to a stadium or a handful of uninterested pub goers, they seem to be doing it for themselves, which is exactly why it is such fun to see them in action, swapping guitars for synthesisers and back again and occasionally losing footwear but steaming on like they don’t even notice.

Like the Higgs Boson this band have currently not really proven their existence, but if their performance tonight was anything to go by we should soon have a new fundamental building block of music to kick off a new big bang.

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