Aural Aggravation

Christopher Nosnibor

I simply wasn’t prepared for this. I’ve been digging the latest Daughters album, You Won’t Get What You Want so hard for months. I’d been told by various sources that live they were killer: in particular, they absolutely fucking slayed at Roadburn. I’d not had the best of days, and was primed for beer consumption and catharsis through the medium of music. And yet, I was nowhere near prepared.

It’s a sell-out and filling out nicely early doors, and despite having been advertises as being in he community room, I’m elated to discover that it’s the (also sold-out) Alabama 3 gig that’s in there and that Daughters are playing in the (and it pains me to say it but it’s true) iconic main room. It’s a broad demographic, ad while there’s the inevitable proliferation of beards, the age span is broad, there are several Dillinger Escape Plan T-shirts and a gothy woman is sporting a ‘Visualise Total Annihilation’ Swans T-shirt like the one I’ve left in the laundry at home.

Jessica93, it transpires, is usually a band, but on this occasion is a solo artist, and a guy in a baggy wide-striped jumper and faded blue jeans with long hard and a fairly simple-looking pedal set-up, although it turns out said pedals run through three separate amps, and there’s a loop pedal in there. Geoff Laporte arrives on stage, throws down his leather jacket with zippy clatter and after some trouble with leads, he kicks the drum machine into action. He thrashes out a few guitar chords, and then swapping the guitar for bass, begins to layer things up. The songs are a grunge meets goth hybrid with a hefty shoegaze twist. The expansive, layered, guitar-driven and emotionally-wrought opuses call to mind the late, lamented and criminally underrated God Machine; elsewhere, snaking guitars, solid basslines and humping, fill-riven drum sequences are pure March Violets / Red Lorry Yellow Lorry / Sisters of Mercy. Cranes and The Cure are also worth a mention as reference points. And while a lot of loopers are hesitant, and tend to focus in vocals and simple arrangements, this performance stands out by virtue of Laporte’s first-take assuredness, and the fact he actually manages to sound like a full band – and a bloody good one at that – creating a dense, driving sound. At the end of a fantastic set, he petulantly kicks his kit tone side and walks from the stage. On balance it’s a cool finale and finish.

Jessica93

Daughters don’t immediately strike as cool as such. They’re rapturously received as the packed-out crowd press forward and they open with ‘The Reason They Hate Me’, a jarring, jolting mess of Jesus Lizard-influenced nihilism that’s ruptured by a nagging synth groove just when it threatens to collapse into noise. For all the squalling fury and abrasive intensity Alexis S.F. Marshall presents quite affably: he may be overtly channelling hard, but bouncing back and forth from foot to foot and side to side with each beat, the suited and booted front man seems almost buoyant, chipper, as he bounds through a set dominated by cuts from the latest album, ploughing into ‘The Lords Song’ second and throwing down the magnificent groove of ‘Satan in the Wait’ third. Small wonder the moshing gets going early: for although ‘Satan’ is sparse, sinewy, it’s got all the ingredients of a monster. And delivered at eardrum-pummelling volume, with that snarling, gnarling, subterranean bass grind, it’s hits hard, balancing emotive euphoria and cathartic release. People loft their arms and sing along… up… up….

You Won’t Get What You Want dominates the set list, but they do venture back to their 2010 eponymous album for ‘The Virgin’, ‘The Hit’, and ‘Our Queen’, and dredge ‘Daughters Spelled Wrong’, ‘Recorded Inside a Pyramid’ from 2006’s Hell Songs. Tracking back over their career, their evolution has been immense, but ignoring their earliest work and compressing their last decade actually sits well in context of a band who almost ceased to exist midway through a now-expansive career, it’s a reminder of how unpredictable a band Daughters are.

Daughters

And everything starts to turn toward the end of the set, following the submerged sleaze of ‘Less Sex’, which provides some respite and a moment’s simmering amidst the squall. From hereon in, the band become more manic, and the audience more frenzied. It’s a subtle but gradual shift that accelerates as they announce the last three songs, which culminate in an extended rendition of ‘Ocean’.

Daughters

It’s a blur. Marshall is out in the crowd more than once and deliver his anguished hectoring from various points at the back of the auditorium for a lengthy spell. On returning to the stage, bloody bashes on his forehead, his shirt’s off, his thick leather belt’s off and he’s lashing himself with it, while standing on a monitor turned on its end. Welts appear before our eyes on his back and chest and he flagellates and the crowd frenzies.

There is nowhere to go from here.