Orca Team / Joanna Gruesome / Edible Arrangements : Brighton : Live review

Orca Team / Joanna Gruesome / Edible Arrangements
Brighton, The Green Door Store
3 July 2012

An indiepop triple bill in Brighton had Orca Team, Joanna Gruesome and Edible Arrangements treating the crowd to spectral post-punk, energetic garage rock and 60s surfy reverb. Anna Travis reports.

Edible Arrangements pull off a haunting, glacial, spectral post-punk sound. Creepy, measured harmonies relay around horror organ riffs. The spookiness is undercut by the warm, homely amateurism of the stocking-footed keyboardist, breaking into giggles.

The groups’ bedroom aesthetics extend to the contrived clumsiness of sound check fiddling, which punctuates the set. Casual complaints about mics and amps are becoming indie etiquette.

The feeling attempted is that the show’s not started and the audience is almost invisible, reinforcing the bedroom fourth wall of the stage. The symmetry of the trio draws you in to the private stage space, pulling you towards the tense precision of the drummer at the centre.

It’s rather unsettling to have your musical epiphanies served back to you by some cheeky, noisy teenagers but Joanna Gruesome do an excellent noisy, fuzzy Galaxie 500 cover a couple of songs in. The Wedding Present guitar moments and scattershot drumming keeps the crowd nodding contentedly.

There’s an awkward youthful charm to this gang who keep moaning about ”˜feeling really ill’ and mumbling apologies for various other indecipherables. The girl singer oddly seems to spend most of the time shooting coy glances at everyone rather than letting rip (as much as Shop Assistant style singers ever can) like she does on record (not sure of the non-frumpy term for ”˜on record’ in the format frenzy age).

”˜Sweater’ is a blistering beauty where they apologise (again) for not being ”˜The Beatles or Nation of Ulysses, your favourite bands.’

Nostalgia has reached such a critical mass culturally that ”˜60’s sounding’ is a redundant descriptor. Instead there’s a decade grammar and the 60’s echo chamber vocal is its most active reverb in present indie pop.

Orca Team (pictured) do a wonderfully controlled version of this sound trope. It’s a breezy resonance, as opposed to the churchy moans of Beach House or Crystal Stilts. This is another very tight trio, rippling gorgeous guitar waves, against The Green Door’s moist brickwork.

They manage to pull off a simultaneously sleazy and clean cut surf pop with beach boys drumming and melodies that drown you in super-8, sun scorched bliss.

All words by Anna Travis.