This may sound like it’s going against the grain, but listen up: rock’n’roll rule number one should be never to get blasé. Time and again you hear bad support bands and vow never to bother turning up early again. Hey, it says doors at eight. Fine, turn up a good hour later and you won’t have missed anything, will you? Well, it’s a trap W&H fell right into this afternoon. Ace Dublin youngsters THE IMMEDIATE playing a matinee at De Barra’s at 5PM? Yeah, right that’s really gonna kick off on time.
So it goes that W&H sneak furtively in through the back door at 5.10 PM just as The Immediate are launching into the Durutti Column-style intro riffs of ‘Fashion Or Faith’ from their tremendous debut album ‘In Towers And Clouds’ and – according to the set list your reviewer espies, this is their THIRD song already. And, just to add insult to injury, we’ve already missed the gorgeous noir-ish delights of ‘A Ghost In This House.’ Curses! That’s the last time we get sidetracked by the fishmonger at Dunne’s Stores en route to a gig.
Still, despite this embarrassing faux pas, The Immediate have such an embarrassment of riches to call upon from ‘In Towers And Clouds’ that the shit-eating grin in soon back in place on this hack’s mug. And, even in this broad-daylight, club orange-drinking situation, they are utterly mind-blowing, not to mention absurdly young. Hell, Peter Toomey looks about 13 with his angelic, junior Brian Jones looks, but he grips the microphone (when it’s his turn to sing on songs like ‘Fashion Or Faith’) like he’s got a direct line to the vibrations that drove Ian Curtis, while the way all four nonchalently swap instruments like seasoned professionals without ever losing the momentum is truly something to behold.
The next half hour is a breathtaking blur. A seismic ‘Aspects’ finds Conor O’Brien coming out from behind the drums to share lead vocals and guitar duties with a mad-eyed and intense David Hedderman; ‘Lonely: Locked Up’ is coiled even tighter than on record and levered up brilliantly by Barra Heavey’s probing bassline and is surely the best pop song ever to feature the word “minotaur”, while new single “Stop And Remember” is a breathless rush of heady amphetamine pop that surges for the finish line in truly memorable style.
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The main set proper concludes with a beautifully poised ‘In Towers And Clouds’, which opens with delicate introspection and languid guitar motifs from O’Brien and morphs into a controlled powerplay over five minutes or so, made all the more effective because the band never let the tension slip off the leash. It’s somehow strident and ethereal all at once and shows just how enigmatic and bloody fascinating this bunch of ludicrously talented young whelps are. It’s over all too soon and the band exit quickly, only to be called back for an all-too brief encore. This time, Toomey regains the microphone for a charged version of ‘Can’t Stop Moving’ which flirts restlessly with both shoegazing and the band’s special brand of idiosyncratic angular pop and concludes with Toomey diving from the foot of the stairs and finally dancing wildly in the middle of the floor, lost in the rapture of it all. As mid-afternoon on a Friday goes, it’s quite a spectacle and the perfect way to wind up what has been a truly ecstatic 40 minutes or so.
The Immediate, then, are quite a find. Their story, of course, shows they have been honing this deliriously exciting sound for longer than most of us would imagine, but they have burst onto the scene full of freshness and vitality and are clearly wringing every drop of pleasure out of hawking these marvellously individualistic tunes all over the country and beyond. That’s how it should be done, of course, but for now I recommend you get out and see them rapid-style, while you can still eyeball them up close. I doubt it will stay that way for long.
(www.theimmediate.tv)
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