Wrest, Glasgow review: 'trudging through the motions'

Wrest, Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow ★★

Edinburgh’s Wrest are a genuinely independent grass-roots success story. They’re unsigned, they’ve self-released three albums, they run their own promotions company, and they recently played a sold-out headline show at the Barrowlands.

That’s all quite impressive, but Wrest are also a risk-averse MOR guitar band who needn’t ever worry about being crushed under the weight of their own inventiveness. Blatantly indebted to the sensitive anthem-sized likes of Snow Patrol, Coldplay, U2 and Frightened Rabbit, they have no ideas or personality of their own. The paucity of ambition is bewildering.

Wrest PIC: Jordan Duncan

Singer-songwriter Stewart Douglas has forensically studied those bands and worked out the basic formula for writing A Big Emotional Anthem, which wouldn’t really matter if he had at least one gem in his arsenal to match the undeniable phones-aloft triumph of, say, Chasing Cars or Yellow. But he hasn’t.

Every mid-paced song sounds exactly the same – a generic grey mass of two or three strummed chords, simple lead guitar lines, pulsing With or Without You bass, derivative vocal melodies and “soaring” arrangements designed to surge dramatically at just the right moment. It’s all so predictable.

Whereas Frightened Rabbit once used this well-worn template to express complex feelings in a powerfully honest way, Wrest deal in mere Hallmark platitudes. Douglas is constantly urging us to “keep going” in the face of adversity etc. Well-meaning sentiments, but hardly useful in the grand, challenging scheme of things.

Performance-wise they're just four nondescript – and probably very nice – men trudging through the motions, their ordinariness emphasised by the surrounding beauty of this old Glasgow venue (which wasn’t sold out).

A triumph of marketing over artistic merit, the whole thing – the whole “project” – feels more like a functional business plan than a heartfelt musical endeavour.