White Denim - The Captain's Rest, Glasgow
After an afternoon spent lolling around on the leafy veranda of the Tchai-Ovna tea house in west Glasgow, sipping spiced milky goodness, whiffs of scented smoke drifting past from the hookah smoking couple on the next table, me and my buddy Tonto hit the bar at the nondescript white block that is the Captain’s Rest. Managing to ignore the forced quirkiness of the pub’s decor (case in point being the mildly creepy fibreglass sailor clutching the ship’s wheel embedded in the ceiling), we allowed our bloodstreams to slowly overflow with mohito before descending into the basement to catch support act Fangs.
Although they won brownie points for some slickly styled hair (in the world according to Tonto), Fangs lost out in the music department. Their set was tight enough • it’s just that slightly conceited, over-confident glam-punk isn’t really my kind of thing. The fact that the platinum-blonde singer appeared to be engaging in fellatio with the microphone didn’t really help either.
Cigarette break, bathroom, drink and back down into the by now sweltering dungeon. Passing the time mouthing along with the piped in filler (an unusual but effective choice in the Presidents of the U.S.A.) we watched as White Denim endured a prolonged battle to set up. Once ready however they got right into it, launching a finger-bleeding medley of tracks from recent debut ‘Workout Holiday’.
The music was great, the band producing a gleefully gritty sound and taking obvious pleasure in jamming away together, but was marred by some technical problems, singer James Petralli’s mike rendering him near inaudible. That was fixed, but almost as bad, and smacking of criminal ineptitude on the part of the techs, drummer and backing vocalist Josh Block’s mike remained dead for the entire first half-hour. The band was obviously pissed off by these mishaps, and could probably have handled the situation a bit more communicatively. Nonetheless, they cruised through a fair chunk of their released material, single ‘Let’s Talk About It’ provoking a particularly enthusiastic reaction from the, all things considered, rather understanding crowd.
A pall had fallen on their momentum though, and they wrapped things up with disappointing abruptness right on the dot of 10.45. A damn shame too as White Denim, despite the hurdles thrown their way on this occasion, sound fantastic live, Petralli’s fantastically versatile vocals sailed above the bedlam pounding from the drum-kit to generate a compulsive, sweaty impetus. The music gets an A+, the evening considerably less.