Echoes and dust

July 23 2009 @ Hoxton Bar & Kitchen, London.

There’s a bit of a crackle about the Hoxton Bar & Kitchen when we arrive, and not just because of the incipient thunderstorm. ‘The Mirror Explodes’ has widely been acknowledged as The Warlocks’ finest, most coherent work to date and now’s our chance for us to see them render those songs in the environment in which they are most natural, live.

Bur first, a few words about the support bands. We were seriously impressed with the band that was first up. Wild Palms was a name we’d heard rattling around for a few months now but had not had an opportunity to check out.  The first thing that struck us was the quality of the sound that they’d got, having been somewhat disappointed with the sound when seeing Sleepy Sun in the same venue a couple of weeks ago, Wild Palms had managed to get that thing that most support bands usually can only dream of, a sound set up perfect for their music. The bass tone especially was to die for.

The band as a totality are an interesting proposition, playing post-punk straight out of the Gang Of Four songbook with a splash of Bauhaus they would absolutely not have been out of place if they’d been signed by Factory Records in 1980. Lou Hill makes for an eyecatching, intense front man with a Curtisesque twitch about him and in Darrell Hawkins they have a guitarist of rare talent and innovation. Definitely ones to watch.

We missed Hatcham Social because we didn’t like the drummer’s haircut. This undoubtedly marks us out as shallow and judgemental, but hey ho.

So finally, the main event. The gig room in the Hoxton B & K was sweltering by this point and surely was not going to get any cooler as an unfeasible number of people crammed themselves in.

The Warlocks meandered on stage, said a brief hello to the crowd and then launched in to ‘Red Camera’, one of the stand out tracks on the new record, and the place is soon sucked in to the maelstrom of their pulsing, hypnotic rhythms and swirling guitars. ‘Isolation’ and ‘So Paranoid’ follow in quick succession and comes the massive crowd pleaser ‘Shake The Dope Out’, bringing on the closest thing to a mosh that a bunch of stoners are likely to engage in.

The basic Warlocks template, that of thundering bass groove, shimmering guitars and barely discernable vocals, is one they rarely deviate from, but then why should they when they do it so well and to such tumultuous effect.

The final attack of ‘Warhorses’, ‘Come Save Us’ and the truly mighty ‘Worn Thin’ bring this to a suitably tempestuous conclusion, by which time the room and those inside have almost literally reached melting point.