Bristol's Trinity Centre was once one of the good sweet Lord's abodes, although these days its delightfully scatty, rickshaw bar serves sonic enthusiasts, whilst its creaking floorboards are crept over by many a beguiling artist of a musical persuasion. Just as SALEM provide quite sacrilegious soundtrack down in Shoreditch, in St. Judes proceedings are somewhat more reverent, as Baltimore does Bristol. Up first,
Lower Dens are as quintessentially twee as tonight's headliners tumbling about on rugs in intricately decorated seaside huts, and despite being perhaps the least likely act to fuck up a whole speaker rig since, well, The Boy Least Likely To, the latter half of their set sounds as though it's being battered about from behind a myriad of corrugated iron garage doors. The homely sounds of the lo-fi quartet couldn't be more aligned with the ethos of ATP were it animated by Matt Groening and shot by Wes Anderson, humming tunes taken from Real Estate's quite essential eponymous long player all the while. Yet barring aforementioned equipment destruction, quite potentially a troupe to gaze up at as they ascend to glimmering stardom. Perhaps...
Tonight is of course all about the hallowed return to the West Country of East Coast dreampop duo
Beach House however, doing the rounds in support of Teen Dream,
our second most astounding album of the past twelve months, and the latest in a string of quite sublime LPs conjured almost unconsciously and inconspicuously it seems, within the vagrant mind of Victoria Legrand. Flittering between beguiling siren-esque songstress and gruelling wreck cowered over her beloved Hammond organ tones with similar capriciousness as the bright white LED lights that flicker in the shadows behind, tonight is a masterclass in subtlety, in songsmithery that seeps into your every waking thought, waltzing with every last one in turn, to the tune of heartstring tugger Silver Soul. A swooning, tremolo-drenched Walk In The Park is all but transcendental, barely contained by Bristol's sprawling city centre, let alone the cobwebbed beams here overhead, whilst the cascading melancholy of Norway floats lucidly like driftwood continually decomposed by swathes of Stratocaster, catapulting imaginations to distant fjords and Northern Lights as Legrand's weed-like locks are vehemently tossed and turned like frigid waves before towering fabric pinacles of luminosity. Used To Be is lullaby to the tune of glorious discordance and daydream despondence, whilst the baritone vocal strains of Gila, combined with whimsical strands of reverb-fuelled guitar are otherworldly, of a parallel universe in which days are filled with glittered stardust and Beach House are venerated unanimously, soundtracking supermarket sweeps and beautifully hedonistic holy matrimony alike. Master Of None is tinged with more nostalgia than a shoebox bursting with exposed Polaroid, whilst Real Love sounds like the vacant, phantasmic tinkering of hallucinatory pianos wafting from the skeletal window frames of decrepit mansions, Legrand groaning agonisingly throughout. The downcast faux-disco of Lover Of Mine is so chilling it can only have been dug up from beneath one of many an inner-city ice ring, whilst closer 10 Mile Stereo is minimal majesty at its most savvy, cloaked in elongated wails and sequin-like guitar frenetics. Unlike the monochrome subject matter of tonight's highlight Zebra, Beach House are altogether more polychromatic, as protean and variegated as any number of watercolour sunsets either side of that rather substantial pond we've come to acquaint as the Atlantic...
