Music / Reviews
Review: Horsegirl, Thekla – ‘Slightly unnerving, but an amazingly good time’
Thekla has a 400-person capacity but on Thursday it could have easily been mistaken for a sticky basement in Olympia in 1990.
The audience were clad in clashing shades of plaid and shouting familiarly to the bands on stage; it felt more like a 400-strong jam session than a formal ‘gig’.
The night opened with The Hobknobs, a band who completely refuses to settle on one sound – like a mixtape given to a new crush, consisting of only the ‘cool’ stuff you listen to.
is needed now More than ever
The Mind is a gentle, Belle and Sebastian-esque musing on life, bouncing with folk melodies.
In parts, however, their electronic drone gives them a proximity to the weirdness of Mecca Normal, and the spoken vocals have glimmers of Bikini Kill.
They should have been there to influence riot grrl before it ever existed.
View this post on Instagram
When Horsegirl enter the stage, they wander on, almost as if by accident – a friend of a friend at this jam session that everyone has heard of but no one has met.
A roll of sellotape falls from a guitar and a drum is stabilised by a well placed brick but, amidst the chaos, they lurch into their hugely anticipated set.
It begins with Where’d you go?, a crackling, jumpy tune that sounds like Sonic Youth, if they could only afford blown out speakers.
The lyrics, hummed into the guitar, tumble down the song in a wonderful off-kilter stumble, weaving in and out of fuzzy, blurry guitar.
From here, the night becomes foggy, time is a little warped, the band is a little out of focus and the walls of Thekla disappear.
Option 8 emerges from this fog, flitting around your peripheral vision before settling on the stage, buzzing with electricity.
It is rusty and massive, like an old steam train in the moments before it sets off.
There is little chat between songs, except for the moment in which singer Penelope Lowenstein apologised for wearing a sailors shirt on a venue that was, unbeknownst to her, a boat (everyone thought that you looked great).
Almost immediately the set becomes hazy, the heartbreaking yearning of Well I Know You’re Shy blends into the gentle jangle-y beats of Information Content which floats above the rough dissonance of In Twos. The world slips out of focus for a while, like it does the first time you get drunk, slightly unnerving but an amazingly good time.
The band save the dance hits, if they can really be called that, for the end: Anti-glory followed by I Can’t Stand To See You followed by 2468. They’re as close to pop as Horsegirl ever get.
Driving beats and hummable tunes, it’s not clear whether anyone notices when one song ends and another begins, or whether they just let the final chords spin them into a jumping frenzy.
When the gig ends there is cheering and hollering, long after the lights are back on and the end of gig playlist is fighting to be heard.
Whether an encore is expected or the audience is in a dizzy trace is unclear, but the message is certain: we never want them to leave.
Main photo: Esme Morgan-Jones
Read next:
- Review: Supergrass, Lloyds Amphitheatre – ‘They can throw a party like no one else can’
- Review: Sam Kelly, Thekla – ‘Huge-hearted euphoria’
- Review: Panic Shack, Thekla – ‘A frenzy of flailing limbs’
Our newsletters emailed directly to you
