WHITE HILLS
Soup Kitchen, Manchester | April 12th
On the opposite coast to the current crop of San Franciscan space cadets, New York’s White Hills have been flying the flag for the new wave of burnt-out space-rock with releases drenched in reverb and droning loops carefully balanced between moments of hypnotic beauty and escalating sonic brutality.
However, despite such clear success on record, tonight White Hill came across as one dimensional, dull and excessive, as the band replaced exploration with pastiche and tripped painfully down the rabbit hole. Clearly beat-up after an extensive touring schedule, White Hills as a live outfit abandon the subtleties dotted around their records for a duplication of Hawkwind’s cosmic mantra of the ‘sonic attack’, a no-holds-barred clusterfuck of bleeps and gusts of echo designed to lay waste to your senses in a flurry of cosmic bliss. That’s the idea anyway, and while the initial blasts of the guitar were enough to make your eyes water, the rest of the set become a trial, pulsing away in a metronomic manner for what felt like eternity.
Minutes turned into hours, hours into days and days into years as the band rocked away obliviously like some sort of runaway train. Unlike Wooden Shjips and Hookworms, who also abandon the confines of song structure for loose, extended jams, the success in this method rests in a balanced blend of tempo and groove designed for losing yourself in a steady descent. Totally bland, White Hills lost their audience and the Soup Kitchen became noticeably spacious. That’s when shit got really strange. Turning all Spinal Tap, the band launched into clichéd psychedelic hand gestures, complete with eyes drawn on palms, alongside cringey guitar wankery that looked more like your dad performing Voodoo Chile on Guitar Hero than beholding a cosmic prophet. Perhaps Crack witnessed an off day, but in this case this brand of psychedelia strictly belongs back in 1967.
– – – – – – – – –
Words: Alex Hall
CONNECT TO CRACK
