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Bo Diddley is a highlander! Sons and Daughters are the Velvet Underground playing raw American rock’n’roll with a healthy side order of folk, but the Scottish accents stop you thinking that they’re just copyists. Highlights are the raucous woo-hoos of ‘Johnny Cash’ and the intense, brooding ‘Blood’ that closes the set while ‘Start to End’ breaks the mould, propelled by mandolin and percussion. You can sense that things are just beginning to happen for Sons and Daughters; see ‘em while they’re still playing human-sized venues.
I’d placed the Furnaces’ Scala gig in the top three of the year; after this XfM Exposure night I was thinking: how does four go into three? The set sounds different enough from the earlier gig now that we (and the band) know the ‘Blueberry Boat’ songs better, but it’s familiar too. They play another dizzying quasi-medley of brilliant songs, most (it seems) of the first album and large chunks of the second, all of which are delivered in original, non-album ways. Many of the ‘Blueberry Boat’ songs are reassembled as pieces of the set; hence you hear chunks of ‘Quay Cur’ played as a refrain between other songs and the band play what seems to be extracts (i.e. the most exciting bits) of the rest of songs like ‘Chris Michaels’, ‘Straight Street’ and ‘Mason City’. Everything is a patchwork of vibrant sounds and brilliant melodies, urgent and insistent and stripped of any lean.
Although they start all intense and serious looking, and Matt as ever acts as musical director, it’s pleasing to see smiles break out on stage, which isn’t surprising if you ever see drummer Andy Knowles gurning, playacting and generally behaving in best non-vehicular Keith Moon fashion. The encore, as in May, is Matt and Eleanor together. Eleanor asks for requests but shyly admits that she can’t sing ‘Evergreen’ as she doesn’t know the words but they play ‘Up In The North’ and a sketchy ‘Straight Street’ on which Eleanor sits behind the drumkit and bashes out a primitive rhythm to accompany her and her brother. And then it’s lights up, leaving us to ask each other if that was really as good as it seemed. And it was.
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