New Noise Live – March

With Tiny Ruins and Blouse

“This is a Keep It Down venue”, reads a small sign just inside the door of The Green Note, situated off Camden High Street. Step through the red velvet drapes and you are met with what is essentially a modest candlelit vegetarian restaurant with a bar at one end and a small six-inch high stage at the other. It’s lovely. Almost horrifically so. Most of the audience is seated and you can be certain that even the slightest shuffle, creak or whisper will be met with a stern glare at the very least. During tonight’s support act the barman has the temerity to scoop ice from a bucket. An incensed attendee next to me reacts with the sort of riled single-eyed squint you’d expect from Darling in Blackadder.

The seated patrons make it easy for me to count all fifty-four people gathered here for New Zealand’s Hollie Fullbrook, AKA Tiny Ruins, tonight’s main attraction (other than the Green Herb Falafels).

I became obsessed with the song ‘Pigeon Knows’ last year, and was certain that this remarkably sparse six-minute ode to belonging – along with the rest of Tiny Ruins’ skeletal, delicate repertoire – could only possibly be performed live in a quiet, intense, introspective manner. Tonight, though, Fullbrook is anything but.

The solemn stoicism and contemplative nature of her recorded sound is softened considerably, thanks in part to her relaxed, honest chat between songs. “Sometimes it feels like your guitar is a person,” she begins as a quiet aside while tuning her instrument, almost as if she doesn’t really mean to be talking out loud, let alone into a microphone. Crucially Fullbrook’s voice is also lent a bolder, thicker texture this evening, which helps to emphasise her distinctive phrasing and ultimately maximizes the impact of her intricate, pretty, considered vignettes.

Though I can’t wait to one day see Tiny Ruins perform as part of a fleshed out collective on a much bigger stage, it was a privilege to have witnessed such a remarkable talent along with just fifty-three (notably silent) others.

A week later, and what feels like a million miles from The Green Note, I’m in a packed Shacklewell Arms in Dalston to see Portland’s Blouse. Dream pop? Synth wave? New wave nostalgia? Arbitrary genre definitions aside, it’s plainly obvious that this four-piece boasts a sizeable stock of pop jewels. The light and icy, spaced out synths mesh especially well with Adams’ loping Hooky basslines, the likes of ‘Controller’ hitting the mark in particular. Halfway through the set the driving A Forest-esque rhythm of ‘White’ is well received, especially with the arrival of a beefed up guitar riff, brilliantly offset by Hilton’s simultaneously alluring/threatening refrain: “I wanna see you save me, put your hand on my knee.” Likewise the bouncy Broadcast-meets-Ladytron haze of ‘They Always Fly Away’ sounds meatier than on record, and concludes with an especially edifying swathe of mutant synth sludge.

Like their music, tonight Blouse are a mass of juxtaposition – pretty and sinister, aloof yet accessible, the future and the past.

Words by JON HILLCOCK
Photo by SARAI HARVEY SMITH

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