Cramped, crowded and dimly lit, Audio is tucked away beneath Glasgow’s Central Station and is in fact an ideal venue for tonight’s headline act, Pianos Become the Teeth.
Before their performance, Los Angeles post-hardcore rockers Silver Snakes take to stage, opening with ‘Sundance’, a song that proves to be the highpoint of their short set.
Frustratingly, poor sound mixing drowns Alex Estrada’s vocals in a mire of overpowering bass and distortion throughout, and the lyrical intelligence that can be found within many of the songs is almost completely inaccessible.
Estrada’s raw vocals and powerfully metaphorical lyrics seem far more suited to the band’s quieter material, but sadly very little of it is on show here tonight, leaving the quality of their performance to rest upon the instrumentation alone.
However, that being said, Silver Snakes perform to the best of their abilities, and even as Estrada’s singing suffers the brunt of their far from ideal sound mixing, the overall performance is still strong, packing a charismatic punch that many bands, especially those still relatively early in their careers, can only aspire to.
By the time Pianos Become the Teeth take to the stage, the venue is packed from wall to wall, the crowd greeting the band with an enthusiastic roar as they appear.
Tonight’s headline performance is powerful, moving and intense, the band working their way artfully through a well-structured set of material both old and new, but perhaps the most notable feature of the show is the sheer passion and exuberance of their audience.
Singing-along to every song, the crowd dances and moshes their way through the night, and the air of joyful reverence that so many here seem to display for the band and for frontman Kyle Durfey in particular is striking, and certainly appreciated by the five men on stage.
Durfey is himself an electrifying presence, his vocal as effective on the quieter material of 2014’s Keep You as it is on songs from their screamo days.
Often leaning forward to allow audience members just in front of the stage to sing directly into his mic, he grins in obvious delight at the crowd’s ecstatic response, while maintaining an air of calm humility when speaking in between songs.
‘Hiding’ is perhaps the highlight of their set, and certainly one of the most well-received by the audience, but with the material on offer so varied and so wide-ranging in genre and style it’s difficult to define any one song as their best.
While other bands might be willing to compensate substandard lyrics with heavier instrumentation, Durfey’s song-writing is of an uncompromisingly high quality, and the band’s willingness to depart from their earlier sound in search of a starker, darker style is just one of the many reasons they stand out from America’s many post-hardcore groups.
Based on tonight’s headline performance alone, the passionate enthusiasm of Pianos Become the Teeth’s audience is certainly well founded.
Words: Malcolm Higgins
Photos: Neil Jarvie
