It's still a little sweltering come seven and the dulcet tones of a slapdash ukulele ensemble interpreting Neil Diamond's perennial schmaltz fest Sweet Caroline glide out the door of the
Queen of Hoxton, out into the humid airs of east London. To recur to that oft-rebuked British tendency to explicate the meteorologically obvious it's irrevocably glorious for late March. However hailing from the rugged, precipitous lands of North Wales few luminescent rays may conceivably have struck members of this particularly exclusive
Deaf Club (it numbers just five) and perhaps resultantly, their all too infinitesimal slot supporting previously undisclosed headliners 2:54 beckons the descent of a luscious gloom.
That the quintet brood down in the basement only adds to this striking gloaming-like effect and in playing adopted Cardiffian Jen Long's
FLUX=RAD night, the stray edges are neatly seamed. Indeed Deaf Club are too neat in sonic aesthetic, yet there's a wild and ravaging whirr to their blustery soundscapes that conjures imagery evocative of their native dominion. And although this may perhaps be a somewhat hackneyed annotation their expansive compositional work, ultimately, is anything but: enwrapped in swathes of a honed and freshened fury, Polly Mackey's unblemished vocals provide moist blanket-like comfort amidst the treacherous furore of It, She and exacerbate further the lingering ruination within on devastating emotive culmination Hana. Both lifted from the
sensational debut EP of yesteryear Lull, tonight's half hour is, utterly conversely, an unremittingly intense joy as sticks shatter as though snares were going out of fashion. However newly conceived material (including a brooding, frenziedly rhythmic number recorded a mere matter of days ago by the name of Moving Still) suggests a longevity in an age of diminishing attention spans and the search for quantifiable "content" in place of contenting quality. Whether it be the enthralling histrionics and cascading guitar-strung melodramatics of Mirrors or
the soaring desolation of Sunday, down from which Mackey pleads increasingly insistently, urgently: "Take me home", the two sides to a vinyl-shaped disc of intricate ridge not only exhibit a wholly adroit ability to translate to live context but also intimate a collective future to outrun the running time of the Manics' entire recorded history.
Long states in the consistently excellent second issue of
Zero Core, found dotted about the venue, that their adeptness is enhanced by their 'modesty in knowing quite how good they are.' However without purposively wanting to claw open a gaping ravine of dissension Deaf Club seem, purely subjectively, only too unaware of their monumental ability, nervily blenching behind immaculate fringe. For beyond the shot-from-the-hippest-of-hips Hipstamatic artwork and the premature fog of dry ice which is lacerated by ever more untimely lasers in the dying moments lies a vastly promising, great unknown; one incontrovertibly worth fumbling out into.
.JPG)
