Live Review

Yuck – Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh

• 28th Feb 2011

Sometimes support bands suck. Fact. This is why I always view them with the right amount of suspicion, creeping around pillars and posts to catch a sly glimpse and a cheeky listen, they’re usually pretty bad and I therefore usually go and giggle at funny graffiti in the toilets. Second fact.

However, at this gig, the two support acts were quite kind to the ears and consequently I went penis pun free – first up were Young Spookes who with an abrasive, angry gloom find themselves on the right side of theatrical angst; all feedback and haircuts, clattering through melancholic monologue and big bastard bass lines to create an image and a sound not unlike what four orphaned gravediggers would create if they were left with Jaegermeister, Edward Munch’s Scream and a Joy Division mix tape.

They were swiftly followed by Glasgow’s Paws a band as equally loud as their predecessor but replacing the unhinged doom with a garage-punk driven set of lo-fi shouting and restricted hips; comfortable and mature in their Vans, they’re doing what Britain often does best, which is doing America better than America.

Another band converting that sense of America and indeed mixing the best bits of Britain with the U.S of A is Yuck – if you haven’t heard Yuck, you should, depending of course on how much you like a hazy, fuzzy splash of crashing, crushing, broken beauty. If you don’t, then don’t read on. Their live show which is essentially their debut album and some super special B-Sides sees them delicately poised on the edge of cult and classic; simmering beneath the intense solos and aggressive pop choruses is a bubbling hatred of something, anything, that allows their sound to go from predictable to profound. The comparisons to Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth stem simply from the fact they set their guitars to overdrive a bit and sometimes wear ripped denim; though the influence is of course plain to see with the screeching, mid-tempo faux-anthems and brilliantly sarcastic tone of disappointment behind the lyrics, Yuck are their own band and seem intent on creating something more than an ode to an age.

They’ll grow to be something more than the pale pastiche the cynics see them as, far from borrowing the heavy hearts and clouded guitars of 90’s sound-rock, they will seek to adapt it and turn it into a modern version of a genre too often dismissed by lickspittle scaremongers. If this live show is anything to go by, they’re in this for the long run, and if it all goes tits up, Max and Daniel (formerly of indie-would-be’s Cajun Dance Party) will be back in a few years with an equally on-the-verge band, anyway. All in all, yucking brilliant.