Gig: Glasvegas / Von Iva

Glasvegas / Von Iva

The Mod Club. Friday, April 2, 2009.

A cruddy rainy day out, but it was the first rainy day that had the earthworms out wriggling on the sidewalk — signs of spring, signs of spring. Had a vicious headache earlier in the day, but it was cleared out by the time I was wandering down College, making my way to the Mod Club for an early show. At the door, security was reminding everyone that the band preferred people not use flash photography, which seems totally reasonable to me. Arriving a few minutes behind me, the lads showed up in impressively early time, enough to grab a drink and a spot on the floor as opening act Von Iva were coming out.¹

Knowing nothing about them besides an encouraging wikipedia description as an "an all-girl electro soul-punk group", I had no particular expectations, but found them to be a totally entertaining time. They were a somewhat non-obvious choice to be opening for Glasvegas², as frontwoman Jillian Iva acknowledged, saying, "we left our guitars back home with our penises." Faced at the outset with a small and generally indifferent audience, the band threw themselves into their work admirably. Iva turned out to be a naturally magnetic and physically assertive performer, stepping up onto the bass drum (in heels, no less!) and down into the crowd to try and get people moving and paying attention. They had some good tunes, and a fun sound: sort of a fusion of the synth-y elements of Ladytron with the soulful parts of The Gossip, with a DIY edge and an '80's twist.³ The reaction seemed to grow as their set wore on, partially because the place was filling up rapidly, but they did seem to break through with some of screwface anglophiles. High marks: I thought they were fully entertaining and picked up a CD from the merch table.

And then the between-sets waiting, filled with mood-setting Back to Mono tunes (I recall "Pretty Little Angel Eyes" and a few more of its ilk) and the roadies coming out to tune, and then re-tune the guitars. Enough time to get the crowd, now pretty well packed in, howling with anticipation, building to a roar as the band took the stage.

I think in T.O. a band like Glasvegas are going to be welcomed as heroes, so it was to no surprise that the opening strains of "Geraldine" were met with great delight. For my part, I found the sound to be frustratingly muddy, especially for the first two-three songs, where the guitars couldn't rise about the rhythm section, and James Allan's vocals were buried a bit as well.⁴ Even once the sound cleared up somewhat, I was mildly frustrated by the fact that it all seemed, well, too polite — a bit rote and something of a replication of the album.⁵ This is clearly one of those situations where the source of the frustration is with me, that the band doesn't live up to my idea of what would push them from proficient to transcendent. But it seems to me that Rab Allan's lead guitar is far too contained — what should be a squall of noise bleeding on top of everything else was reduced to a polite roar. I'd found the record to be too "pop" in that manner and had simply assumed that the band, with the rep for a more woolly live sound, would really unshackle themselves on stage. But again, that's me. The crowd, on the other hand, was clearly loving it. It'll be interesting to see where the band goes from here — if the songwriting holds up, this contained sort of wildness could lead the band to big places.

For my money, it was only in "Go Square Go", the last song of their main set, that I really felt it, and that was because all of the questions of how relatively ferocious the guitars should sound were swept aside by the excitement of the singalong's "here we, here we, here we fucking go!". Similarly, the encore's "Daddy's Gone" worked on the same level, where the band could simply drop out and let the crowd take over.

Mixed results, then. The band were energetic but not strikingly dynamic, and they were faithful to their recorded output but didn't really add to it. This isn't going to make me rave about the live show, but I'm sure it'll serve them well — as we departed, J. and The Scotsman (both the type who would be liable to burst out with a "Square go, then?" even if not prompted by a song) kept bursting into one chorus or another as we made our way back up College, looking for a place to enjoy a drink after the show's early end.

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¹ In one of those random things that make an impression, I dug the fact that on the backs of one of their keybs were three masking tape question marks.

² The sole point of overlap between the bands seemed to be that Von Iva's drummer, Kelly Harris, stood up to hammer the skins for a few songs, in the manner of Glasvegas' Caroline McKay. She also looked like she could have out arm-wrestled any of the members of Glasvegas, so perhaps they won the slot through some sort of bar-room challenge.

³ On a couple songs, one slow-burning number especially, keyb player Rebecca Kupersmith's Nord seemed to have the "Fairlight/John Hughes soundtrack" setting fully engaged.

⁴ James (looking not so much like Joe Strummer as if, perhaps, one had gotten a young John Cusack to play Joe Strummer) was clad at first in a black leather jacket, later shucked to reveal a sleeveless shirt with large physique-revealing arm holes. He revealed a great rock'n'roll presence, with an understated charisma that implied volumes with small gestures: no grand thank-yous to the crowd would be as expressive as the way he'd tap his chest after a song and nod, his eyes still expressing a sort of wonder that all these people were shouting his choruses back to him. In that sort of unaffected sincerity he did seem to be projecting St. Joe, a little.

⁵ Even the overwrought introduction and coda to the otherwise excellent "Flowers & Football Tops" was maintained in its stage incarnation. While seeing Distant Voices, Still Lives a couple months ago sort of reconciled me to the idea of the song's incorporation of "You Are My Sunshine" — that, somewhere in a pub in Edinburgh there could be a mum bursting forth in song just like this to mourn for her lost son — it still feels, at the end, a bit extraneous.