Live Review: Harts, Electric Exiles, Lost Woods

Continuing their run of taste-making Friday nights, Cats had solo indie funk savant Harts over at Rocket for an evening of thoroughly wild electric licks. With support from locals Electric Exiles and Lost Woods, the bill was set up for a frenetic night — and such a night was had.

Lost Woods adeptly kicked off the proceedings, gently at first, but quickly building energy. Their intelligent instrumentality and thoughtful charm would have won more than a few fans from the early crowd. A quick turnaround had fellow Radelads Electric Exiles take the stage with their adapted Brit-garage-pop tunes. Building a warm, layered wall of sound, they held up their end of the bargain and kept the building crowd in good supply of big smiles and gentle head nodding, before retreating to the crowd under cover of vigorous applause.

The stage was dark when Harts materialised from the smoke; it’s hard to be sure that everyone saw him immediately, but there he was, one dude with a guitar and a synth. He said something polite about being happy to be there and went to work — and what joyous work it was.

Listening to the studio tracks on Harts’ self-explanatory debut EP Breakthrough, knowing that he played all of the instruments, may leave one curious about how it’ll translate onto the stage. The simple answer is: impressively. There was a shadowy figure at the back of stage on the drum kit, but Harts was our man: front and square he stepped back and forth from behind the synth, swinging his guitar to his side with funk-star swag.

The set was a delirium-inducing tour of heavy rock riffs, soulful mellow near-ballads and the unmistakable electro-funk fusion that weaved itself through the musical narrative. Some tracks, like Leavn It All Behind, even began to encroach on disco territory but remained unwaveringly modern.

As the show gained momentum, the fuzzed-out fret-work intensified with the urban activist anthem-to-be Streets before the true crescendo: a fierce rendition of Purple Haze — and the crowd was left with little choice but to excuse itself to kiss the sky.