SPARE SNARE / JEMMA ROPER | LIVE REVIEW
The Moon, Cardiff, Sun 13 Jan
Jemma Roper’s most recent album was entitled The Thumping Heart Of Night, but there’s precious little to get pulses racing this evening. It doesn’t help that her performance has all the passion and enthusiasm of someone wearily fulfilling a contractual obligation. Every now and again, however, there’s a hint that she and her band might prove capable of picking up where Howling Bells left off in giving indie rock a subtly gothic makeover.
Spare Snare were once named the 46th best Scottish band by The List – the very definition of being damned with faint praise. It’s an accolade that the lo-fi outfit from Dundee no doubt cherished, in that it recognised their qualities but didn’t threaten to compromise their status as a cult concern. After more than 25 years of beneath-the-radar existence, this is the band’s first ever appearance in Wales – fresh from a festival at which vocalist Jan Burnett estimates only five per cent of the crowd had ever heard of them – and in support of last year’s LP Sounds, a selection of songs spanning their whole lifespan.
The stomp of Action Hero provides as punchy an opening to the set as it does to the album (The Delgados do The Wedding Present), and I Am God, Bugs and Smile, It’s Sugar all follow in a similar vein. Debut single Super Slinky is dedicated to one fan with whom Burnett has been corresponding for the last couple of decades but whom he’s only just met tonight. (That’s the thing with cult concerns: to most they mean nothing, but to some they mean absolutely everything.)
However, it’s band anthem We Are The Snare that really resonates. Its lyrical claims – “We don’t do interaction … we don’t do social skills” – are somewhat tongue-in-cheek, undermined by the way that Burnett roams among the audience smiling and shaking hands. But the lines “We don’t do fashion trends” and “We don’t do what you want” ring true, encapsulating the admirable bloodymindedness that has seen Spare Snare through the last quarter of a century.
words BEN WOOLHEAD photos NOEL GARDNER