As you’d expect, when sweet ‘birdsong’ hits the backwaters of Shoreditch there’ll be a host of twitchers ready and waiting. And so it was that when this particular Texan variant known as Feathers touched down in London, there was a full-on full house in attendance. Much lauded since the release of the lush Land Of The Innocent (and their recent SXSW appearance) in the hands of former Cruel Black Dove vocalist Anastasia Dimou’s, the all-girl synth-pop outfit make it all look effortless. With agile guitar licks and charming stage presence as they spin out their dark, ethereal, shoegaze sound.
With a glacial purveyance that could almost be lifted straight from Robert Palmer’s Addicted To Love girls, they hit up the pop exuberance of Familiar So and Grimes, and the paced monster that is Believe – which captures the essence of the Feathers sound against that all-encompassing electro beat. They excel at fusing Ms Dimou’s ghostlike vocals with sharp synth precision that bears echoes of the 80s: you could say they’re Depeche Mode in a female guise.
Their best-known song – possibly due to a not unpleasing, sultry video – Land Of The Innocent, unsurprisingly receives a delighted response. A ‘twitcher’ in the crowd gets over-excited, and then annoyed, when he attempts to capture lissom keyboardist Kathleen Carmichael at a crucial moment during Soft, the steely synthed new single release. Perhaps a touch on the mechanistic side for the purists, yet tempered by the deft songwriting ability and their feminine charms, Feathers look set to fly high.
In the age of the video, Glitches, like Feathers, dealt a winning hand with the filmed accompaniment – set on a cold, windswept beach – to Warm Seas at the beginning of the year. The temperature in the room for the live rendition tonight, however, is far from chilly for these London electro-groovers who opened the show.
The Whitechapel trio made an impact last year with their debut single, Leper, tonight’s set opener. Now, their shimmering electronic pop sound is in a league of its own. They’ve been likened to Foals, possibly by way of their combining the warmly rich and melodic as epitomised on Warm Seas, with equally dexterous use of drums and bass, while No Prisoners shows how undulating and sexy the Glitches slide is. When they end an all too brief set with their forthcoming single Only Time Will Tell, everything seems to suggest that the Glitches story has already been foretold: success beckons.
Photo credit Glitches – Danny Keir
Photo credit Feathers – John Rulton
