Glasvegas
Liquid Room
Edinburgh
March 1st 2011
Things could have went either way for Glasvegas between 2008 and now. A platinum selling debut album, a fan base that stretched from Glasgow to god knows where and, as if that wasn’t enough, the press proclaimed them ‘the most significant British band of the decade’, passed them the captains arm band and sent them out to show the rest of the world just what all the fuss was about. That kind of overwhelming pressure would possibly cripple most bands lacking the artillery required to live up to such critical acclaim but, as history did record, Glasvegas played the countless blinders of the gifted, weaving their way around the potential banana skins of hype to emerge at this end nearly two and a half years later hardly troubled. These days they don’t have to prove themselves to anyone. Their second album ‘EUPHORIC/HEARTBREAK\\’ (an italicised torment for any grammar pedant surely) was road tested early January with a series of low key gigs in remote Scottish towns and villages and the reaction has been pleasing. So…new album, new songs, new drummer (Jonna Lofgren in for the departed Caroline McKay) and a new decade…..
Ditching the black clothes that had for so long been ‘his look’ Glasvegas front-man James Allen leads his band onstage for tonight’s sold out gig dressed entirely in white - an image from which the cultivation could either be symbolic or whimsical, I wouldn’t know, but the thundering collective roar that welcomed their arrival from a crowd who’ve packed this venue to it’s capacity is a sure sign, regardless of who’s wearing what and why, that Glasvegas are a band that matter to these people. Opening song ‘The World Is Yours’ is raucous rock & roll with a guitar driven seam and shuddering bassline unlike anything they’ve done before. The drumbeat, much heavier and more defined than it’s ever been suggests a definite shift in musical direction from the wall of sound style they employed on previous material. As the opening chords of ‘Geraldine’ ring out inciting celebratory bedlam and the first of tonight’s crowd sing-alongs it’s obvious how much the older songs are still wanted as they tear the words from the mouth of James Allen before he’s had the chance to sing them - and he allows them this - happily staying quiet as they take it for their own, before re-joining the song with them through the last chorus and end. Staying with the older material, his soaring lead vocals during ‘It’s My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry’- the self wounding confessional of a cheating bastard coughing up his guilt- crack in the air as he sings ‘it’s funny how me fucking her about has got me in this fucking mess’, before it’s seized upon by the crowd and launched to football terrace proportions as they sing with him ‘what’s the story morning glory, I feel so low and worthless, yeahhhhh’. Once again the way he wrings a song of epic proportions from the bones of normality and human nature is an outstandingly poetic event.
New song ‘Shine Like Stars’ is followed by another fond look backwards with old songs ‘Polmont On My Mind’ and the poignantly heartfelt ‘Flowers And Football Tops’ - a song about the death of a child from the perspective of the mother - which is tonight fittingly stripped of all instrumental contribution except for a haunting solitary keyboard and lead vocal so gentle it’s more a ghostly scrape along a surface heavy with grief. It could be the desperate cries of any parent in the world heard grappling with heartache in the line ‘my baby is 6 feet under/ just another number/ my daughter without her brother. A performance so mesmerising the Liquid Rooms is reduced to silence. A loud, energetic cover of The Korgis hit ‘Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime’ is followed by another crowd favourite ‘Go Square Go’ with its repeated refrain ‘here we, here we, here we fucking go’ being, as expected, the loudest sung lines of the evening. Ending, pre encore, on new single ‘Euphoria, Take My Hand’ before coming back out for ‘Daddy’s Gone’ and ‘Ice Cream Van’. As they left the stage for the final time the crowd were still chanting for more. They hung around...not wanting to move away...just incase... but they didn‘t come back. They didn’t come because it never hurts to leave an audience wanting more.
Written by Alan Baillie for SUBBA CULTCHA
Photographs by Suzanne Hancock
Thanks to Tilly Knowles at The Charm Factory
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