“I’m pretty nervous tonight,” Nancy Wallace confesses to a packed Borderline. “I can see the whites of your eyes,” she tells the people in front of her, all of them staring in her direction, rapt as ecstatics, transported, hanging on her every word.
According to someone nearby, Richard Swift’s band look like they’ve just come off a trawler – the sort of image I aspire to, obviously. They sound, however, quite different: at this point, uncannily like a soul harmony group, somewhere between The Miracles and The Stylistics.
A busy night at Club Uncut, with Banjo Or Freakout, The Delta Spirit and Crystal Antlers, though annoyingly I managed to miss the first band (I was held up at a screening of Armando Iannucci’s Thick Of It movie, In The Loop, if that’s a good enough excuse). If anyone caught Banjo Or Freakout and fancies filing us a quick review at the bottom of this blog, that’d be great.
According to Daniel Rossen, sat onstage in front of a notably packed Club Uncut, this is only the second ever ‘proper’ gig by Department Of Eagles. The first, it transpires, saw the band expanded to a five-piece, augmented by a couple of the Dirty Projectors and another of Rossen’s bandmates in Grizzly Bear.
It’s just gone 10.27pm, and the guy standing next to me turns to his friend with a big smile breaking across his face and says, “I can go home now.” Wild Beasts have just finished playing “Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants”, their debut single, and possibly the only song I can think of that contains the word “moribund”. In fact, “Clairvoyants” is anything but moribund – it’s a great, joyous conflation of high end Johnny Marr-style melodies (I’m thinking particularly of his playing on Talking Heads’ “Nothing But Flowers”) and the more life-affirming side of Arcade Fire, maybe something like “Wake Up”. It’s a high point, certainly, of what’s proved to be another excellent night at the Borderline.
They should have just started a 35-date European tour as guests of The Hold Steady, who pulled all their shows earlier this week due to the hospitalisation of guitarist Tad Kubler. Instead, Philadelphia’s War On Drugs find themselves stranded in London, where they were probably considering busking as an alternative to starving on the capital’s streets before being added at the last minute to tonight’s Club Uncut bill at the Borderline.
