Drenge performing new album Strange Creatures in Bristol (Jessica Bartolini / Live4ever)Drenge –
As we know, and has been proven on countless occasions, momentum is key.
Ordinarily you’d hear this principle applied in the sporting arena, namely football, but it’s equally as important in music. Many is the band that have stalled after taking a long break, and Drenge could have found themselves at such a fork in the road; their third album Strange Creatures was released a few weeks ago, nearly four years after their last.
It wasn’t completely barren before then; the Castleton mob kept their toe in through an EP release and a large amount of touring, but it’s been a few years now since they were lauded alongside Slaves as heralding the return of British rock. The landscape has changed, with kitchen sink punk being the order of the day. Is there room for Drenge?
Simply put, yes. The band have shuffled the pack a little; now a four piece, Rob Graham has moved from guitar to bass and they’ve brought enforcements in that department in the form of Ed Crisp. Their sound, always meaty, has been bolstered by the adjustments. They open with Prom Night, which sounds like a doom laden Arctic Monkeys in both lyrics and music. It’s a perfect tone setter before Bonfire Of The City Boys explodes all senses; the mammoth beat is like the Prodigy at their most ferocious whilst the light show which accompanies it in time is hypnotic. It’s a barnstorming start.
From there on it’s an equal split of songs from their three albums. As ever, the earlier material gets the bigger crowd reaction; the chainsaw guitar on Never Awake drowns them out, while it propels like mid-era Strokes on Face Like A Skull. Rob Graham’s move to guitar has been a revelation, he is the star of the show and the heart of the sound. Deserving of a specific mention is the sitar-esque chiming he adds to a new brooding version of Backwater, and he adds spectral mood to a Balearic breakdown during Running Wild.
The new boy Crisp gets his moments on bass too, sounding meaty on Teenage Love and Strange Creatures. As for the Loveless brothers, Rory on drums is as stoic as ever and provides the patter between songs and Eoin gets lost in the songs, giving no care to the shapes he’s throwing. His vocals do sail quite close to Ricky Wilson at points, but offset against his intense delivery it’s purely coincidence.
The main set closes with Let’s Pretend, the live version inevitably expanded, scraping the sky then staring from the gutter for a glorious eight minutes or so. For the encore we are treated to the slinky, sleazy When I Look Into Your Eyes before proceedings are brought to a close by the poptastic We Can Do What We Want. Although Drenge may have stepped out of sync, this showing is a pure distillation of why they should not fret if that this the case.
Their musicianship and power will always stand them in good stead.