VENNART
Manchester’s Pijn boast a unique instrumentation. Playing tonight as a sextet, guitar, bass and drums are augmented by violin, cello and lap steel. Their glacial chamber prog evokes loss and longing, which is fitting for a band named after the Dutch word for pain.
Swelling tides of plaintive strings and mournful glissandi crash on the shores of Pijn’s pagan post-metal. Their painterly vistas are many miles away from the spiky hyper-modern cubism of the headline act, but they go down well with the appreciative crowd and there’s a sense of sadness when it’s all over too soon.
Keeping the northern theme, the lights dim and John Cooper Clarke’s Evidently Chickentown provides the walk-on music for Vennart.
Drummer Denzel sparks like a live cable as he fires up the stuttering fizzing rhythm of Binary from current album To Cure A Blizzard Upon A Plastic Sea. With bass chords from exOceansize cohort Richard ‘Gambler’ Ingram, its insistent stop-start awkwardness isn’t conducive to filling a dance floor, but the infectious beat makes you want to try nonetheless.
Talking of awkward infectiousness, Sentientia channels Vennart’s beloved Cardiacs. Its wall of noise is adorned by art pop flourishes and too many chord changes to ever attract radio play, but that’s why we’re here tonight.
Infatuate from 2015’s debut album
The Demon Joke is similarly poppy with a singalong chorus and a drum break that goes on way too long to make a prog-agnostic audience comfortable; the band are really starting to sizzle now. Mike Vennart throws his impressive array of guitars around with gusto, clearly enjoying himself in his own intense way.
Spider Bones was made for live performance. Gambler’s catchy bass line and that groove are irresistible. This is disco for krautrockers.
Robots In Disguise, co-written by ex-Oceansize and Amplifier guitarist Steve Durose, is slightly marred by a lack of concentration when Mike Vennart triggers a wrong patch. Adding injury to insult, an electric shock jumps from the microphone. Hey, it’s live, folks. Thankfully, nobody dies and all is back on track with a storming Donkey Kong, the ‘What the fuck’s this button do?’ lyric gaining extra resonance now.
That’s Not Entertainment is a last chance for a slow dance, building to an anthem of epic proportions.
Having three original members of Oceansize onstage, it’d be rude to leave without giving the crowd a taste of their much-loved catalogue. Part Cardiac and Build Us A Rocket Then… from their final album Self Preserved While The Bodies Float Up are explosive reminders of that era. The brooding, Lynchian Music For A Nurse is the perfect way to close a gig that can be summed up as serious fun.