Music review: Jill Lorean, Hug & Pint, Glasgow

Bum notes were all part of the fun as Jill Lorean made a welcome return in full-band mode, writes Malcolm Jack
Jill O’Sullivan's new musical vehicle Jill Lorean also features drummer Peter Kelly and Frightened Rabbit’s Andy Monaghan PIC: Stephanie GibsonJill O’Sullivan's new musical vehicle Jill Lorean also features drummer Peter Kelly and Frightened Rabbit’s Andy Monaghan PIC: Stephanie Gibson
Jill O’Sullivan's new musical vehicle Jill Lorean also features drummer Peter Kelly and Frightened Rabbit’s Andy Monaghan PIC: Stephanie Gibson

Jill Lorean, Glasgow Hug & Pint ****

“I do each clanger with love,” said Jill O’Sullivan, sweetly styling out the occasional bum guitar note struck during the preceding song.

The Belfast-born, Chicago-raised and for many years now Glasgow-based singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist scarcely needed apologise for being a touch rusty, considering how rare live shows have been thus far under her solo alias Jill Lorean thanks to the pandemic. Full band shows such as this one have been rarer still – “a rarer sight than lightning striking a volcano” as she put it in a tweet. In any event, bum notes are all part of the fun at what was, as O’Sullivan reasonably pointed out, “a rock’n’roll show”.

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It certainly was that, with O’Sullivan – occasionally on fiddle, but mainly electric guitar – heading a fierce and no-frills power trio, also featuring drummer Peter Kelly and bassist Andy Monaghan (formerly of Frightened Rabbit). It was at the front of another trio – much underrated rootsy indie-rock ensemble Sparrow and The Workshop – that O’Sullivan first made her mark around a decade ago. Captured on the Monaghan-produced debut album This Rock, her music as Jill Lorean feels like it’s cut from similar cloth, but in a way that’s more focused and unburdened this time: raw heaviosity with a country gothic twang – equal parts Sandy Denny, Warren Ellis, and Led Zep.

It’s the voice that grabs you first and always on O’Sullivan’s songs – a Grace Slick-esque high and shrill cutglass instrument that cansomehow chop cleanly through any quantity of fuzz and distortion. “To be wild, to be free,” she exclaimed in the refrain of Mothers, in what could practically have been a mission statement.

Someone was already making a grab for the setlist as O’Sullivan announced there’d be no encore, and a queasy violin loop sample beganto sound – the unnerving bark of Black Dog, a Neil Gaiman-inspired odyssey into dark fantasy and slanted melody, and perhaps O’Sullivan’s best song yet.

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