Having read mostly great things regarding Oceansize on W&H, your reviewer was very much looking forward to their Glasgow date on the “Music For Nurses” e.p. tour. They arrived on stage to a suitably icy piano & drum loop, & launched into opener “Paper Champions”, which suffered from an uncertain mix, Mike Vennart’s vocals buried under the admittedly bracing waves of hyper-distorted guitar figures & a bass sound that set off strange reverberations under my rib cage.
Band & sound man both found surer footing on “Amputee” & “One Day All of This Will Be Yours”. The latter reminded me of some of the tricksier time-changes of “Hail To The Thief”-era Radiohead, crossed with a guitar sound & delivery that owes more to Queens of the Stone Age.
However, Oceansize really came into their own, for this reviewer at least, with the mid-set one-two of “Gambient” & “Catalyst”. The former was a really quite beautiful combination of Mogwai-when-gentle spaced-out guitar melodies & a Vennart vocal reminiscent of something Jason Pierce of Spiritualized may once have offered up. At times almost taking the shape of a sound-scape that could have cropped up on Bowie’s "Low", all this was propelled by Mark Herrin’s muscular hot rods, toms & cymbal work, & eventually gave way to the night’s first detonation of seismic proportions during the ensuing “Catalyst”.
I’m not entirely sure how to describe it really. Suffice to say up until this point I had been watching some talented musicians work their way through intricate but not necessarily well crafted songs, & was beginning to wonder a little what all the fuss was about, but once “Catalyst” arrived one had no choice but to succumb to the Oceansize brand of rock and/or roll.
|
This momentum carried them through “Remember Where You Are”, but by the end of W&H “Effloresce” highlight “Massive Bereavement” (dedicated by Vennart this evening to Brian McFadden, with, eh, something less than heartfelt sincerity one suspects), things were starting drag a little again.
Your reviewer need not have worried however, as set closer “One Out Of None” (a.k.a. “Horse’s Cock”, at least according to the sound man’s set list) juxtaposed stop-start dynamics, interludes of mellow melodicism, and, of course, The Riff, before culminating in a storm of frenzied distortion/feedback/screaming from Vennart/encore inducing uproar from the crowd.
The challenge was answered by the somewhat astonishing “Saturday Morning Breakfast Show”. Steve Durose’s vocal conjured up echoes of the opening to Sigur Ros’ “()” album, before the night’s third (by my count) & final truly stratospheric outbreak of guitar damage. Taken on their own terms, Oceansize were never less than workmanlike this evening, & on occasion pulled themselves up to heights that few of their contemporaries could even dream of visiting.
|
