Avast! / Piano Bar Fight / Twin Atlantic / Juliet Kilo

It’s impossible not to love independently promoted gigs - the merchandise is cheap, the venue is intimate, the people who attend are there because they genuinely care about the music, and this happens to be one of the strongest line-ups that Dundee has seen in quite some while.

Not all goes to plan for openers Juliet Kilo - technical problems mean that they play with next to no lighting, meaning that they appear as four silhouettes on the stage, and broken bass strings and guitars going out of tune mean that there are some awkward silences throughout, though their brand of windswept indie more than makes up for this.

	"it’s a night that delivers a great deal of promise and goes a small way to show the depth of unsigned talent in Scotland"

Twin Atlantic also have to play in near-darkness, and what their art-punk tinged rock lacks in innovation is more than made up for their energetic performance, at some points it’s difficult to tell if their frontman is playing their guitar or receiving electric shocks from it! Given a few more months, they could be a force to contend with, and would certainly be able to appeal to a wide audience given some mainstream exposure.

As a reviewer, word count limits are a real pain in the backside - not only because Piano Bar Fight deserve page after page of enthusiastic praise, but because they have songs like “Some Said They Saw The Spark, But All We Saw Was The Smoke” which pretty much take up your entire review!

If you were to blend together elements of ‘Hope Is Important’ era Idlewild, The Smiths, Sigur Ros, early Snow Patrol and toughen it up so it roars when it’s at its loudest and whispers gently in your ear when it’s quiet, you’d be on your way to reproducing the music of the five Glaswegian musicians.

Songs such as “Hiding In A Foxhole When I See Stars” and “Radio Inertia” hold a cultural intelligence within them, and singer Sean Cumming contorts around the stage much like a young Roddy Woomble, and it helps that he has a very impressive voice on him. Content on touring small venues and working hard right now, Piano Bar Fight are set to be one of those “I heard them first” bands in a couple of years time, if not sooner.

It was always going to take a quite special band to finish up the night, and sadly, hometown boys Avast! are simply not that band. Playing songs from their debut album Faultlines, they manage to be quite entertaining to begin with, but as the set drags on, there’s a lack of variety in the pace, and as a result, the enjoyment factor does begin to drop halfway through the show, despite an incredibly tight rhythm section.

It’s a shame - the duo of Andrew Cook and Nico Weststeijn have plenty of charisma, but without a little more variation, the live experience will remain a little repetitive.

Despite this, it’s a night that delivers a great deal of promise and goes a small way to show the depth of unsigned talent in Scotland. The Scottish underground has the fire, and they’re about to set light to a venue near you.

FUTURE GIGS

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