Alright the Captain - Bloc + Glasgow
Alright the Captain, promoting their new album Contact Fix, stole the hearts of their Glasgow audience, with an uplifting performance, full of melody and funky rhythms, which are simply heart stopping in their intensity!
The venue tonight is the very contemporary post modernist Bloc +, serving great street food, and with a soviet style East European ambiance, and a preponderance of plaid shirts. The PA in keeping with tonight's gig, is playing lots of technical/post metal music. The stage area is up a few steps, and provides a very intimate setting, where audience and band are in the same physical space....there is no escape! Tonight though, an escape route is the last thing anyone would wish, when Alright the Captain hit their stride.
What is really apparent with this great band, in a live setting, is quite how funky an outfit they are, with lots of swing to their sound. The spindly guitar lines perfectly complemented by the jolting funk rhythms, and a band that can't keep still for a second, is how the first number goes. At the end of the number, guitarist Marty invites the audience to join a 'semi circle of death' around the band. The bewildered audience isn't sure how to respond....these guys have a fabulously droll sense of humour.
As the set progresses, bass and keyboards player Todd charges into the audience anyway. It's a fabulously quirky gesture, and speaks to a manifesto of confounding expectations, that is so massively impressive about this band. Or try Marty’s exhortation to the audience later in the set to shout 'honey badger' twice. We do of course, as the band seems to have us all in an almost hypnotic musical hold.
Toaster Mouse is an early stand out with its almost frenetic dance like feel, great keyboard riffs and complex bass runs. It gets a great audience reaction.
HBT live really produces the most beautiful, chiming, and ringing guitar lines. The almost jazz-rock like shifting time signatures evidence the amazingly deft playing of drummer Jamie. Not forgetting the cool keyboard activated clapping samples, which seems to fit perfectly. It's noticeable that the members of the Envoys, also on the bill, are there at the front really getting into the music.
Ben and Barbara, dedicated by Marty to St Valentines day, is just ferocious, with a crashing heavy metal style final section. The band as they finish the number, demonstrates that as a unit they can come to a precision stop, completely in unison. It’s almost telepathic. Amazing!
This band are creating live music for the head, the heart, and crucially the feet, and they almost effortlessly connect with a live audience. As audience member Keiran Allen quipped at the end of their set ...'They are creating a canvas of music. It's art'.