Pulled Apart By Horses
– GORILLA, MANCHESTER –
I like Gorilla a lot, but I also like the Salisbury pub around the corner, which is why I miss the first support band Shinies: too busy propping up the bar with a pint of Old Peculiar while I wait for my mate to turn up. I’ve seen Shinies before a couple of years ago and their sub-Libertines schtick wasn’t enough to convince me to run through the rain to watch them on my own this time. Maybe they’ve started living up to the hype now, I dunno. Old Peculiar is delicious though, I know that. We arrive as indie supergroup Menace Beach tear into their opener. Although they don’t stray too far from their grunge template, the new song they play is the best of their set, expanding into more of a 60s garage rock, Nuggets-y vibe. Their Duracell bunny drummer Nestor Matthews, also of Sky Larkin fame, is still the star of the show, pounding away at his kit and pulling all the enthusiastic drum faces anyone could ever wish for. They could maybe do with cribbing fewer Pixies riffs though.
Pulled Apart By Horses kick off with their recent single ‘Hot Squash’, the opening track from third album Blood. It’s closely followed by ‘Skull Noir’ from the new album and both are well received but the first big cheer of the night is reserved for second album highlight ‘V.E.N.O.M’. An extended version of fan favourite ‘The Crapsons’ sounds absolutely blistering, especially considering bassist Robert Lee explains that they “sounded like a crap cover band of ourselves when we rehearsed that one earlier this week”. There are a couple of references to their recent stint supporting Kasabian around Europe with their mentions that they’re happy to be back playing their own shows without barriers at the front, although Gorilla’s security seem less than happy with the amount of people taking advantage of this fact. It did mean we got to see the world’s worst stage dive though; getting on stage and turning around to see that no one is there to catch you does not make for good crowd surfing.
The latter half of the set is more Blood-heavy, which means there’s a slight lull in enthusiasm. As good as it is, it’s certainly not as excitable and fun as the previous two records. There’s some excitement down the front when recent single ‘Medium Rare’ arrives though. The video features a man in leather trousers with a skull for a head pole-dancing to a room full of passed out fans, several of whom are apparently in the room. All is forgiven when Big Scary Monsters-released riff monster ‘High Five Swan Dive Nose Dive’ launches a thousand (more successful) crowd surfers. The encore consists of a double header from their debut, the brilliant ‘Yeah Buddy’ and closer ‘Den Horn’, effectively one big juicy riff that goes on for seven and a half minutes. It’s still ringing in our ears as our collective sweat is washed away by the Manchester rain and we make our way to the Garrett for more drinks and, for some reason, a jukebox that keeps playing Slipknot.
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Like all cis-male atopic half Welshmen, I'm a big fan of shouty indie, noisy drone and the daytime Radio 1 playlist. Outside of punk rock my primary interests are tea (white no sugar please) and beer (brown no sugar please). When I'm not writing about stuff for Silent Radio I'm occasionally doing my own stuff which you can read about at http://dead-pheasant.blogspot.com if you want (you should).
