Live Review: COLOUR and guests - Night & Day Café.
So it turns out the Night & Day Café isn’t the place to celebrate St. Patrick’s day; no four-leaf clovers, no special offers on Guinness and a saddening lack of people sporting green-felt hats, or maybe there was just a saddening lack of people. Feasibly, this may be the bar to attend if one would rather escape the sloshy St. Paddy shenanigans. I bought a pint of Guinness nonetheless, and found myself a seat that directly faced the empty stage and psyched myself up for the array of bands I’d never heard of.
First up: The Visitors… should think about changing their name, as they didn’t turn up. Meanwhile, I made a visit to the bar for another Guinness.
The second, but first band to make the stage were Liam Browne & The Love. It didn’t take long for me to decide that this band are barely worth paying attention to, in fact I think there was more inspiration to be found at the bottom of another Guinness…
*Belch*
The third band to make the bill, except second to make the stage, but first band catch the attention of my beady eye, was Clear Green: very obviously an Oasis reinvention, complete with Gallagher-like vocals and that ‘wall of guitars’ feeling, the only difference was found with the lead guitarist. His input went a little further than the pentatonic scale, and demonstrated modern-indie inflections, as did his floral shirt and high quiff. I had no qualms watching these guys, but despite their wide variety of original songs, their sound was dominated by that Oasis feeling. That’s a great foundation for them to develop their musicianship, but confines the band and prevents them from appealing to an audience further than just Oasis fans, but at least they’re based in Manchester.
Finally, the band that was going to brighten my evening, COLOUR. These guys marked a very obvious leap in professionalism and talent. They are also the only band that reflected current trends in modern rock, except they did so with a very intricate flair. The vocal harmonies, even when isolated were on point. If the vocal melodies ever lacked, the instrumentation quickly stepped in to make amends. The high pitched, manipulated riffs that they demonstrated are elaborate enough to be performed by a math rock band, but they kept it 4/4 and catchy, so it’s actually possible to dance to. That being said, only two girls were brave enough to conquer the dancefloor that evening, and it was for the band’s currently unreleased, ‘Killer’.
After the performance, with Guinness in hand, I marched up to lead singer, James for a chat. Whilst signing t shirts, he told me the biggest place COLOUR had played was at Man City stadium, and also mentioned that they’ll be playing gigs soon with “a couple managers watching” and that they’ll “hopefully get signed”. I have every belief that COLOURS will get signed. Their live sound is identical to their recorded material and there’s a very clear space in the market for their music. It wouldn’t be a far-cry to place them aside such giants as 1975 and Foals. So I gave the gentleman some short words of encouragement and quickly fucked off to some other pungent pub to get St. Paddled… Cheers.