MUSIC

Thekla, Bristol (Fri 2 Dec)

Despite the name, ‘White Hinterland’ is not a right-wing chill-out combo but an elastic-larynxed girl called Casey Dienel. She’s bowing and bouncing behind a keyboard, weaving dreampop madrigals over heavyweight beats. Her words are lost in multi-layered moodscapes of synth and spectral harmony – soundtrack to being chased by a beautiful woman through a moonlit forest. Goosebumps rise as her voice soars and swoops. It’s artful and meaty; think Dirty Projectors with bigger bass, though she ends with a whimper, her timid final track swamped by late-arriving Little Dragon hunters. The female quotient is pleasingly high; perfume begins to overpower the usual gigpong of socks and armpits. Everyone’s here for headliners, who tease with a long, slow build-up, hi-hat hissing as the tension mounts and finally erupts into tribal throb. As her band (beardy, boyish, baldy) bend out bass and nostalgic synth, sassy little frontwoman Yukimi Nagano throws shapes and taps a drum pad that looks like a giant eye-shadow palette. They despatch runaway hit ‘Ritual Union’ early on; then head off on a meandering jam through most of the new album – sultry-sad dance music that’s bulbous and repetitive enough for the drug set, sufficiently compelling for everyone else to get lost in.  Their success lies in being several things at once – detached yet engaging, melancholy yet optimistic – their sound appropriately chimeric. There’s lithe proto-funk, hi-sheen retro pop, dubby low-end and opaque soul searching, often all in the same song. Bjork smearing LCD Soundsystem in Lemon Jelly.  The drummer – shaven of head, nice blond ’tache – smacks away with machine-tooled precision as Nagano tonks a cowbell and strikes pose after artful pose. We get extended percussion work-outs, languid space jams, a detuned 80s wig-out like a dying arcade game. The band slip away one by one, the synth boys leaving a spooky cosmos of sound in their wake, then encore with ‘Twice’, the first song from their first LP – break-up blueness, tremulous piano, silence: a wistful farewell. The show’s an entity in itself more than a series of separate songs – a live set like albums used to be. (Mike White)

Copyright Mike White 2011