Gig review: Remember Remember, SECC, Glasgow

IN THE intermissions between songs there was a strange static hesitancy to Remember Remember.

Their low-key and decidedly humble entrance was split by a stray note of feedback, causing guitarist, keyboard player and bandleader Graeme Ronald to joke that we’d just heard a new composition entitled Whale Death. After which, each retuning was exacting and extensive. “Glasgow a big party town?” Ronald murmured at one point, his guitarist intervening with a few quiet lines of INXS’ manly Need You Tonight.

That forceful momentum isn’t a part of the Remember Remember experience is certainly no disappointment. The Glasgow-based sextet, originally Ronald’s solo project but now a live conglomerate of some of Scotland’s finest alternative musicians, play with a precision that invests their singular instrumental rock with an almost classical sensibility. Influences are drawn from all over but never over-played, from the slowed-down spike of New Wave to a rhythmic, repetitive rumble redolent of krautrock and an ambient, almost folk quality. Such versatility was emphasised by the fact the band were playing xylophone and saxophone alongside guitars and drums.

With a loop of abstract film footage playing behind them, the set had as much a feeling of being a living, breathing, carefully conceived art installation as a space where events might diverge from the script. Yet although last year’s The Quickening has been shortlisted for the inaugural Scottish Album of the Year Award, Remember Remember are a band whose crystalline vision is best enjoyed in person.

Rating: ****