Reviewed on Tuesday January 5
Beck may have only needed two turntables and a microphone, but Black Vanilla can go you one further – they only need some thudding sub-bass and some seriously flexible dance moves and they’ve got the party started. The Sydney trio are primarily concerned with minimalist rave beats and intense build-ups that blend elements of hard dance, hip hop and garage of the non-rock variety. “I know it’s a Tuesday, but just pretend it’s not!” teases vocalist Marcus Whale. We’re quite content to do just that, as Black Vanilla transport early attendees into the throng of the late night into the early morning.
Having previously warmed up for everyone from The Prodigy to Birds Of Tokyo, Ecca Vandal knows how to hype an audience. What’s less certain, however, is what her music itself actually entails. Too much of a heavy rock act for hip hop heads and too much of a hip hop act for the rock kids, Vandal falls into indecisive grey areas, ending up not quite working for either. It could be her busy-sounding backing band only working in small doses or purely the non-committal nature of her genre-hopping, but there’s still a ways to go as far as Ecca Vandal’s concerned.
Formerly only been exposed to Sydney through means of festivals, it’s finally time for Young Fathers – the group widely considered to be making the most important music in Scotland right now – to deliver their first-ever headlining show. Some have evidently been waiting years for this, refuting the broader nature of bigger dance festivals in favour of getting the full experience in far more intimate surrounds. It is they, subsequently, who are perhaps rewarded the greatest out of all in the room. The setlist spans from their earliest releases – ‘Rumbling’ from Tape One; ‘Queen Is Dead’ from Tape Two – to their most recent LP, the urgent and uncompromising White Men Are Black Men Too; including ‘Old Rock N Roll’ and key single ‘Rain Or Shine’.
Wherever they take the audience – the mean streets of the city; their long-oppressed cultural roots – it’s at once white-knuckle intense and hands-up revelry; pure catharsis with the primitive wailing of drums exuding a substantial degree of their collective energy. They leave the stage after an hour in waves of droning synth noise, as if they are to fade into static entirely. No encore. None needed. Veni vidi vici, Young Fathers.
