Subcircus - The Garage
This London quartet, Subcircus, ought to be quite pleased with themselves really. Hard working fellas, they played pushing on a hundred gigs last year.
Supported the likes of Suede and Stranglelove. Put out their debut album, which is being met, ever so slowly, with more than its fair share of recognition. ‘Carousel’ is something of a tangled mess of intimate wordplay and ambiguous sexuality, telling of neon capitals, freak shows, and pretty sick priest cyberpunks. Endlessly compared to the Radioheads and Suedes of this world, they’ve nonetheless put their own stamp on the realm of epic guitar songs. And tonight marks the end of a promotional push for their first single ‘86’d’, a conversation about rejection, taking place somewhere between a restaurant and the sidewalk outside. The Garage is somewhat packed.
Their singer P.B. Jnr. immediately attracts your gaze. His elfin looks, his mod like suit. Is he a girl dressed up as a boy? Maybe he’s a boy dressed up as a girl dressed up as a boy. The teasing lyrics of ‘20th Century Bitch’ provide us with a clue (‘For I’ll be the girl and you the boy/We’ll blend’).
‘This is our pop song,’ P.B. announces, referring to the imminent and uncharacteristically cheesy guitar hook, but ‘Shelly’s on the Telephone’ sounds more intense and gritty than ever. Even the soft chords of ‘So Strange’- a belated Valentine’s gift- are masked with an envelope of underwater noises. Nikolaj extracts an altogether darker sound from his guitar on this occasion. The cosmic waltz of ‘Las Zoot Suit’ follows, and sees him lapse into an extended solo in which he weaves us a beautiful, uplifting theme. And the magic comes to a near to a close with ‘Gravity girl and Analogue’, ‘U love U’ and ‘Stormfly’. Cue rapturous applause.
‘Thank-you. Thank-you very much’ are among the few words that P.B. utters tonight. And it is all that he needs to say- he mirrors my own thoughts.
Sa
