Eagulls

Green Door Store, Brighton

It’s Friday night, and up and down the land, hundreds of bands intentionally fashion performances that firmly stick to being little more than modern day reinterpretations of past greats. More of the same is not the cure for a rock scene rich in tired clichés.

Eagulls honed their craft through hard touring, and they pay a welcome return to this familiarly squared room beneath Brighton train station to deliver a ferociously taut set to a hundred or so people who had been looking ahead to this moment for several months. When Eagulls make their way through the crowd and step up onto the stage, there is a genuine anticipation that these five men from Leeds offer so much more than just the sum of their parts.

As projected grainy black and whites images flicker behind them, the five cast themselves off on a sonic trip that navigates its way through the material that makes up their powerful, self-titled debut album.

Eagulls steer their way through a set rich in post-punk dystopia, but rather than offer a Xeroxed copy of past glories and offer it out as their own; they seamlessly create noise that is chiselled from remnants of post-punk, new wave and hardcore but recycle it in such a way that it appears vibrantly new, exciting and utterly essential.

Between-song conversation is kept to a minimum, as singer George Mitchell instead turns his full focus on leading the four around him through punk-spirited songs such as the reverb-drenched and attitude-heavy Possessed and the ferociously fast paced Nerve Endings.

You’ll be hard pushed to find a band summoning such a vitally important sound right now.