Former Champ, Glasgow review: 'shades of Blondie attitude'


Former Champ/Dallas Love Field, The Hug and Pint, Glasgow ★★★★
Baby, it’s cold outside but the snug Hug and Pint basement was busy and toasty for the latest in their First Footing series of January gigs, showcasing the acts to look out for this year.
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Hide AdGlasgow four-piece Dallas Love Field combined mesmeric melodic guitar lines with bittersweet vocals and contrasted spiralling, sonorous riffs with grungier rhythms to produce a sound clearly influenced by the so-called shoegaze bands of the early Nineties. With the renewed popularity of first generation shoegazers Slowdive and Ride, it’s an ethereal style which continues to cast a spell but Dallas Love Field never stinted on the indie pop hooks and ended their set with their pacey, propulsive recent single Drowned Out.
Headliners Former Champ have previous form in other outfits. Frontwoman Claire McKay is otherwise known as folk pop singer/songwriter Martha Ffion, her guitarist husband Craig Angus fronts inventive indie combo Savage Mansion, the rest of the band go as far back as their school days and they all came together with confidence and fluidity across a dynamic set which ranged freely from the angular garage of Beginner's Luck to the grungey chug of Sly TV, the power pop of I Promise (I'm Not Usually Like This) to the pert and pacey Jewellery.
Big Surprise was short and bittersweet, while there were shades of Blondie attitude in the strutting new wave seduction of Stella.
A handful of new songs bode well for their next round of recording. The swinging bassline of Porcelain was embellished with some Thin Lizzy-like guitar licks and the hitherto untested combined influence of George Harrison and Camera Obscura produced Crooked Little Line.
Again, melody was key throughout, from the Breedersesque More Than U Give to debut single Grenade, while they continued to romance the regions on another early track, Motherwell.
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