THREATMANTICS / SILENT FORUM / JOEL HURST | LIVE REVIEW
Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff, Fri 22 Feb
A veteran of local bands Brothers and Tibet he may be, but tonight is Joel Hurst’s solo debut. If there are any first-night nerves, though, they’re not showing. His confidence in his voice and guitar playing is understandable, but is perhaps rather misplaced when it comes to his songwriting. As my companion notes, we’re never half the world away from a busker’s rendition of Half The World Away, the spectral presence of Noel Gallagher soiling more than a few tunes. Still, Hurst has a good song about being a wage slave who lives for the weekend only to spend it all in bed, and pulls an excellent cover of Two Gallants’ Steady Rollin’ out of the bag too.
Everything Solved At Once is the title of Silent Forum’s forthcoming LP, vocalist Richard Wiggins reveals – but this evening’s set arguably poses more questions than it answers. No sooner have they nailed “fun pop songs” (Wiggins’ words) like Robot, which is Interpol recalibrated for the dancefloor, than they seem to have careered wildly off-course into writing the much looser, more esoteric material that makes up the middle of the set. It doesn’t all work, but the ambition is admirable, their collective talent is self-evident and if there’s a degree of arrogance and bitterness in the superlative How I Faked The Moon Landing, a song about feeling themselves apart from (perhaps better than) their Cardiff contemporaries, there’s also a degree of truth.
But this is Threatmantics’ party, thrown to mark the release of new album Shadow On Your Heart, which Heddwyn Davies concedes has been a while in coming. Seven long years have elapsed since they put out predecessor Kid McCoy, during which time they’ve become no easier to classify. Resolutely ragged viola-fronted post-punk-folk, perhaps? Whatever – it doesn’t matter. The fact is that they’ve never sounded as unique as on Now You Are Gone, freaked-out as Mother Folker From Hell, sharp and catchy as First Things or (simply) as bloody good as the title track.
Davies switches between English and Welsh, they treat us to choice older cuts like Shotgun Billy, a well-oiled Friday night crowd contribute handclap accompaniment and all too soon a particularly frenzied Don’t Care comes to a halt with bassist Graf atop his amp. Cardiff certainly does care: it’s good to have Threatmantics back.
words BEN WOOLHEAD