Gig review: De Rosa

Published on Monday 12 January 2009 19:11

DE ROSA ROCK THE BOAT @ THE FERRY, GLASGOW

MUSIC is a very serious business when done by De Rosa – a band who seem to approach their task – eyes lowered, heads nodding – with all the sober determination of a team of social workers.

It's a winning formula (honest) that's already seen the Bellshill quintet produce one classic Scottish debut album – 2006's Mend (its follow-up, Prevention, is due in March and is every bit as good) – and roughly help fill the gap left at their record label, Chemikal Underground, since the demise of Arab Strap and Aereogramme, by combining a little of the former band's kitchen-sink grimness with some the latter's alt-rock muscle.

They're not exactly the sorts, then, that you would have expected to find discreetly slipping Take That's Greatest Day into their live set. But the circumstances were somewhat exceptional: Rock The Boat is a charity concert in aid of homelessness organisation Shelter Scotland, which encourages its bands to have a bit of fun (and goodness knows De Rosa need some of that) by playing covers, rarities and new material rather than simply a standard set.

Earlier, hirsute junk pop crew Mitchell Museum had treated the crowd to Marilyn Manson's Disposable Teens as imagined by Cake, while heavy rockers You Already Know had treated Talking Heads' Psycho Killer to a royal savaging.

The towering boyband schmaltz of Take That was too much for even De Rosa's severe-looking frontman Martin John Henry to deliver with a straight face. But the band – boosted to a five-piece since the recruitment of guitarist and keys player Andrew Bush – had plenty of fresh material to get sombre on besides.

Much of the new record was aired – a work of steely intensity which subtly remoulds the De Rosa template to fit elements of methodical slowcore and glitchy electronica, while still maintaining that folkish sense of time and place that made Mend so special.

A Love Economy and It Helps To See You Hurt were two of its standouts here, all ominous and rumbling, while the older numbers, Evelyn and The Engineer among them, seemed only to have grown deeper and darker with time.