Gig review: Bleached, The Art School, Glasgow

“NORMALLY that’s the stoner song,” Bleached’s young Drew Barrymore-alike frontwoman, Jennifer Clavin, exclaimed after Dead In Your Head, looking a little dismayed, “that time it was the fight song.”

Bleached

The Art School, Glasgow

Star rating: * *

True enough, the crowd had parted suddenly during its opening strains, as three guys engaged in a short but fairly brutal bout of fisticuffs. Which while upsetting enough in its own right, was also doubly unwelcome for interrupting this Los Angeles quartet’s only number of any great distinction.

With its chugging bass-line, stabbing chords and irresistibly smart chorus-within-a-chorus – imagine something by a more primitive version of The Primitives – Dead In Your Head was a rare variation of pace and formula in a set where rudimentary punky, garage-y, surf-y indie-pop speedbombs reigned, of a sort indistinguishable from countless other American groups of the moment (Best Coast, Vivian Girls, Dum Dum Girls, you name it).

Bleached would surely make no claim to being a pleasure of any especial complexity – as they thrashed their guitars and shook their hair, there was a feeling that if you weren’t cutting loose and partying with them, then you were against them. “You guys can feel free to dance,” Clavin feistily goaded her audience at one point, “we’re not in Glasgow every day.”

When she ditched her guitar and took on a more animated role, Clavin led entertainingly by example, albeit at further expense of nuance in the three-chord dirge. As the final feedback-y strains of Outta My Mind faded away, it was difficult to imagine people talking about the band quite so much as the fight as they turned for the door.

MALCOLM JACK