The sticky remnants of a scorching bank holiday weekend are thick in the air of the Bar and Kitchen. The back room is chokingly hot. And it’s stuffy too – everyone is gleaming with beads of polite, inculpable sweat, compounded by the garish lights illuminating every crevice of the sullenly space. There’s only a few of us here though, which makes the shiny visages acceptable; but there’s still a pervasive sense of unease, dense, like the soppy air of a steam room.
“I’ve just sung a whole song without my reverb backer, Jesus,” exclaims A Grave With No Name’s heinously coiffed frontman AS. So that explains the throwback Wheatus tribute aesthetic, all defiant but flat-as-a-pancake vocals and lazy riffs, like tossing said pancake into a lumpy, dishevelled heap in the corner of a frying pan. The unease is infectious, then. It’s a disappointing introduction to a band who, at their best, can sound like the love child of Fugazi and Explosions in the Sky, as if they’re traversing a rocky causeway through a disused mine to locate the secret to a lost philosophy they read about in a dusty hardbound volume bequeathed by a distant relative.
And then there were Women (pictured), who don’t half dilly-dally around. Twiddling knobs and wiggling wires and checking plugs and sockets and leads for what feels like a good hour, the all-male quartet, like the best of men, try the patience of an acutely self-aware audience. Because sweat is streaming now, like the incessant tears of a break-up that no amount of tissues will plug.
All that tuning is pretty damn essential though, ’cause the one instrument that wasn’t treated to such painstaking attention to detail, the drums, sound as drab and lifeless as unseasoned chips. ‘Flashlights’ changes everything. Retreating to the stage peripheries Christopher Reimer and Patrick and Matthew Flegel tickle their guitar strings conscientiously, cooking up a storm of ambient gurgles, jangles, twitters and rattles – in essence, copious amounts of artful feedback. Drummer Michael Wallace thumps his wares with the look of a man possessed, his hands a-blur, his dirty blonde locks thrashing. What is consciousness? Who gives a fuck? Women stop time. They’re scintillatingly soporific and we’re lured into a heady stupor of passion and near hypnosis.
They play all those songs. The ones you’ve heard, the ones you know, that we know: ‘Cameras’, ‘Black Rice’, ‘Group Transport Hall’, ‘Upstairs’ et al. Nothing stands out. Nothing spawns a body of its own, thrusts itself in your face and screams: “Look at me, you fuck, I’m a great fucking song,” because they bleed into each other, blending undetected like piss in a stream. Trying to snap out of the hazy, lucid dream is impossible. Women tighten their grip. Reimer strums like a feverish teenage masturbator. He’s in the zone and so are we. No-one cares about the heat anymore, it’s no longer oppressive, it just is.
