The second date on Honeyglaze’s latest batch of UK tour dates finds them at the excellent Hare & Hounds venue in Birmingham’s Kings Heath, for a show that sold out pretty much as soon as it was announced. The South London three-piece released their second album, Real Deal, last Autumn to a serious amount of critical acclaim and have been championed by BBC 6Music.
Before they arrive on stage, Oscar Browne delivers a well-received half hour set, trying out some new tunes but including 2023 single ‘Cut Me Off’ as the penultimate song in his six-song tenure. Browne’s soaring vocals and reverb-soaked guitar place him in Jeff Buckley territory, more for his approach than the sound of his voice. The 30 minutes flies by and the crowd pay him the greatest respect that a support artist can get in actually keenly listening to him throughout with not a hint of the chatter that can blight performances.
The pin-drop atmosphere (in a good way, there’s plenty of applause between the songs!) carries through when the headliners take to a stage bathed in bright lights to begin with ‘I Feel It All’, from the aforementioned Real Deal record that will provide most of the songs of their set tonight. Their sound is sonically similar to later Throwing Muses (when they went down to a trio), with a lot of light and shade and space in the songs. There are really quiet bits that would suffer in a less attentive room and crescendos that raise the roof; the sound engineer is doing a fabulous job and you can hear every note. Though the songs sound like every note is carefully considered, with no room for anything superfluous, at times it’s hard to believe there are only three people on stage. Indeed, the room is so packed that I wonder if there is a band member I can’t see.
The band actually will briefly become a four-piece later on when Oscar Browne returns to the stage to accompany them on a terrific ‘Ghost’. Guitarist / singer Anouska Sokolow is an engaging presence, chatting with the melting crowd between songs, even canvassing opinion on what the audience’s favourite brand of TV is, before ‘TV’. If you are wondering, it appears to be Samsung! Midway through the set, the group’s astonishing debut single‘Burglar’, a six-minute epic that was quite a statement for a first release, and it is rendered perfectly here. It turns out to be the only song tonight NOT from the second album, even being introduced as Sokolow dryly stating “We had a new record out last year. This wasn’t on the record.”
By the time the band end with ‘Don’t’, the crowd has been treated to an hour of a band on the up and at the very top of its game. There is no doubt that their star will continue to rise.
