Live: '90s Nostalgia. Compressed. Sustained. Towns, Bunch of Grapes.

You may already be well aware of Towns, the South West's best export the treble clef side of pressed apples and pies. You may well have read of them here, or here, or, God forbid, on the intangible pages of this very site (here). Although you're most probably yet to see them, predominantly due to the fact that they've played next to no shows thus far, having only been in existence since February. Way out west however they're constructing something of a reputation for successfully excavating nuggets of '90s nostalgia, and tonight sees them take over backstreet Bristol boozer Bunch of Grapes to throw together a bunch of bands and curate the inaugural Feed Me with Your Hiss. An array of unnervingly affordable and equally disconcertingly coloured cocktails are clinked and spilt on gaudy carpet as the decade the troupe grew up in is distilled down into twenty-five minutes of retrospective aural onslaught as they look back over their shoulders for influence, bolting for a radiant future. Swoonsome, Loveless-esque guitars are processed through a Boss CS-3 for the refined anthemia of Heads Off, compressed into less than three minutes, whilst their sensorially relentless set is sustained by sprightly, spring-stepped frontman James MacLucas who later concludes proceedings by tumbling into the melée, wailing into battered neck pickup all the while.
Ultimate harmoniousness is achieved on Fields, a blithe but frolicsome nod to The Seahorses' supreme, quite literally one and only LP Do It Yourself as MacLucas bounds about with the exuberance of a boisterous (Jarvis) Cocker. Munificently, sweat wiped from brow and both pint glasses and eyeglasses returned to respectively corrected longitude and latitude, he prowls the lingering crowd to thrust a copy of their forthcoming single in every overzealous hand. This town ain't big enough for Towns, and on this evidence it seems as though they shan't be bashing away in the dank and dingy corners of nondescript watering holes for many more months...