Gig review: Wild Nothing

Published on Monday 29 March 2010 10:07

WILD NOTHING *** CAPTAIN'S REST, GLASGOW

"I HOPE you don't mind that I don't talk too much," apologised Wild Nothing's winsome singer Jack Tatum towards the end of this show. "I just don't like that stuff."

We might have guessed that from the music, frankly.

This lot deliver the kind of heart-swelling guitar chime which surely rings around every shy indie boys head, a distillation of every British shoegaze band to have plodded the land in hope of a John Peel session in the late 1980s.

To add to the sense of youthful isolation, Tatum is actually the only on-record member of Wild Nothing, a guy who records his music all alone in his Virginia bedroom. The other three members of the band, Jeff Haley, Nathan Goodman and Michael Skattum, are just the touring backing musicians, but they could all have been chosen from a catalogue, a big book of handsome-but-weedy indie slackers in plaid shirts who play their guitars with heads tilted forward at a 90-degree angle while rocking gently from side to side.

The echoing guitars and reverb-heavy vocals of songs such as Summer Holiday and Confirmation are reminiscent of Ride or Swervedriver, and Tatum's voice also possesses the same mournful quality as that of The Cure's legendary Robert Smith.

Some of the loud basslines seem inspired by Peter Hook's playing, too, adding to the impression that Tatum is a specialist Anglophile, expertly recreating a sound that has threatened to make a comeback for some time now, without ever quite managing it.