Live Review: Dallas Crane, Child, Brobort

The world seemed a little out of alignment. Why was everyone on Enmore Road wearing their baseball caps backwards?

 

Oh, that was the Nas audience. Meanwhile, just around the corner at the NSC it appeared – as the Fauves’ song said – everyone is getting a three-piece together. Or maybe that’s how support bands keep overheads down. Brobort made a muscly four-square rock noise while doing the cool thing of not appearing to care; they were actually pretty good.

 

Child are also of the drum/bass/guitar trio mode, with down-past-the-shoulders hair and music of somewhere around 1971. Heavy bluesy rock that throbs through the floor and up your spine while girls named ‘baby’ are advised to Heal Me.

 

Dallas Crane are in a slightly problematic middle ground. Their gig here round the middle of last year evidenced the band’s resurrection, but now it’s about working towards a new album, and an audience who want to hear the familiar. Happily, they realise this - so get the room onside with an opening brace of the ones we know: No Through Road, Iodine, and a largely accidental and fairly shambolic run at You Am I’s Berlin Chair - with Dave Larkin shouting the chord changes as they went.

 

A couple of previews are offered: So It Goes and the Pete Satchell-fronted Get Off The Dope well fit the Crane template of hatefully catchy guitar hook and chorus the blokes in the crowd can raise their glasses to, and yell. Then the ones that have been howled for most all night: Dirty Hearts roars, while Wrong Party’s ‘I wasn’t born in a nativity scene…’ refrain is delivered from both stage and floor. And then it stopped, although most of band and crowd decided another drink was well in order.