Music review: A Trip Out With British Sea Power

THIS intimate performance by British Sea Power was surely precisely why Mirrorball, the music strand of the Edinburgh Film Festival, was devised.

The performance began with a series of the Brighton band's self-composed videos, predominantly shot on 8mm, with rapidly cut images of them messing about in the English countryside, but the standout was nevertheless the rather more conventionally filmed Remember Me.

Technically accomplished, yet strikingly simple and affecting, the band inhabit the bodies of military statues, motionless save for the whites of their eyes or slight movements of their mouths, the urgent chorus imploring remembrance for these heroic figures, even as the footage is underscored with humour. The film is a startling entreaty to reconsider the stories and sacrifices behind the urban architecture that has faded into our peripheral vision through familiarity.

The main event though, was the band's accompaniment of the 1934 docu-fiction Man of Aran. Unlike The Pet Shop Boys' live soundtracking of Battleship Potemkin with various European orchestras several years ago, there was much greater modesty of scale here, and the initial footage of the island and the subtlety of the playing was mildly soporific.

Yet, ignoring the film's dubious claims to authenticity, with the hunting of a basking shark depicted as if it were a great white, the stunning editing and cinematography of crashing waves and whooshing spray found its perfect emotional parallel in the band's dramatically rocky ebb and flow.