Spree Festival
SAY Award showcase
Spiegeltent, Paisley
Sean Guthrie
Four stars
IN the pursuit of eclecticism, however noble, there are winners and losers. Happily, on a chill autumn evening in an olde worlde travelling tent, the former outnumber the latter.
Glasgow-based punk-pop trio PAWS are hobbled from the off, their spirited racket completely out of place in the all-seated auditorium. They’re a game if gauche lot, though, and soldier on with a set culled mainly from 2014 album Youth Culture Forever and debut Cokefloat. Theirs is relentlessly derivative stodge which packs all the power of a budget-hotel hairdryer, which renders the positive response it meets baffling to say the least.
More intriguing by far are electronic duo Happy Meals, who pilot a spaceship whose thrust comes from disco beats, analogue synthesizers and Suzanne Rodden’s French-language vocals. Nominated for the SAY award for their debut Apero, Rodden and Lewis Cook’s quest for tonal mischief might come at the expense of enduring melodies, but that aside Happy Meals are immeasurably more substantial than the micro-feast they get their name from.
Appropriately, the night climaxes with a set from Kathryn Joseph, whose Bones You Have Thrown Me and Blood I’ve Spilled won her the SAY award and provides the bulk of tonight’s set. And what a climax: Joseph is the rarest of beasts, a performer who makes each member of the audience feel as if she is singing only to them, only for them, summoning every atom of her being and channelling them into her performance. The hummingbird vibrato, the swing between the tenderest of whispers and lustiest of roars, the way Joseph commands the song: all are gratifyingly present and correct, and send the throng out into the cold neon glow, bewildered and bewitched.
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