Dank and drab, you know November's come when it's gone. And unfortunately its autumnal misery still lingers. Yet in the dense, metre-thick brick that houses Bristol's best beached venue imbued with a somewhat Medieval sense of mystery a bonafide superstar lies in wait, mulling over the fusion of such bricks, fused together, ostensibly, with human blood. Myth and urban legend aside, tonight lumbers into life quite lethargically, as inconceivably revered 'new blood' duo
2:54 come across all too much like Warpaint ripping the incisors from Romy Madley Croft's coy Les Paul reverberations. Sisters Hannah and Colette Thurlow, despite NME laudations and occasionally enchanting guitar lick, are all too calculated as they desperately claw for the gloom and doom of Esben & the Witch whilst seeming approximately as hexing as their faux-anguish is perplexing. It's got Jamie Hodgson swooning and snapping away in the front few rows like a beguiled Pentax, so expect incessant infatuation in the most exclamatory pages of a certain rag any moment now...
Melissa
Auf der Maur then appears amidst enough dry ice to line the Tamworth Snow Dome as The Hunt thunders on in backing track format, ginger locks recoiling, gleaming resplendently under spotlight. The macabre power chords of Isis Speaks ensue, before a raucous, strobe-soaked Lightning Is My Girl transforms der Maur in siren-esque songstress, vicariously enticing sitting atop cataclysmic bassline. Glaring up from between the pylons and pillars of the Fleece, a sense of nostalgia is evoked throughout, as memories recur to grungy nights and grottier mornings on Richfield Avenue as wristed sweatbands, walking sticks and rain macs, Boss Overdrive, Gibson guitars and NME hacks are the order of the eve. Barring the waft of illicit substance on the smoggy air it's as if we're tonight congregated in the vivacious heart of the Radio 1 tent, it's the August bank holiday weekend, and intoxication is even more extortionate that it's here become. Real A Lie, slithering and seething is delivered with venomous zeal, Auf der Maur's deadpan vox slicing through hefty distortion and rollocking bass drum rapidity, before the stoner slump of Lead Horse sounds akin to Secret Machines gorging on Liars' slow-mosh. My Foggy Notion crunches limbs, pulsating at a similar BPM to the majority of Josh Homme's roisterous work, whilst Head Unbound is cinematic in portentous apocalyptica. Follow The Map joins the dots ever so slightly formulaically, before the title-track from latest LP Out Of Our Minds melds together the jittering treble of Nina Simone's Feeling Good with a sumptuous drawl and accompanying tribal rhythm in pure aural proficiency. Flitting between soothing intersong interaction delivered almost homeopathically in tone, and the undiluted exuberance of covers of Black Sabbath's Paranoid and The Patti Smith Group's Because The Night (a rousing, if faintly contrived Grrrl power duet with Colette of 2:54), Auf der Maur proves to be more than a retrospective recollection of times past, eras of Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness, of Courtney Love's shedding of Celebrity Skin in order to pen irrevocably striking riot rock, giving us a fair few Reasons To Be Beautiful, or at least vaguely gleeful.
