AMAZING Baby, from Brooklyn, seem to be taken with life in York. “A beautiful city,” says lead singer Will Roan as he takes to the stage. “And it has great spaghetti.”
With the niceties out of the way, the band launch into a set which slaloms from the groovy to the grandiose.
Amazing Baby have a big sound, with monolithic riffs and brutal percussion battling it out beneath Roan’s vocals. But there’s a delicacy to their music that saves it from cliche.
Take set closer The Narwhal, a Led Zeppelin-alike shuffle, with howling backing vocals and urgent guitars building to an epic conclusion. There’s a lot of bands who try to sound like Zeppelin, but few pull it off.
The reason why Amazing Baby manage it, and the reason they work as a band, is because they will put a Zeppelin-influenced track next to a Bowie-influenced track next to a Primal Screaminfluenced track.
They pull together these disparate sounds into a strangely coherent tangle of noise. It’s hugely selfindulgent, but a lot of fun.
When the album drops this summer, it’s experimentalism means it will either be a massive success or it will sink without trace.
On tonight’s evidence, I’m going for the former.
James Entwistle
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