Radar Kills In The City

We had a really fun party on Sunday at Night And Day for Manchester’s In The City new music conference.

We pulled together a load of the bands we’ve been most talking up over the past year or so, with a particular acknowledgement of our surroundings. The audience was comprised of a who’s-who of local Radar alumni: Delphic, Hurts, etc. We had all on to stop ourselves welling up.

The bill was: Egyptian Hip Hop, Wolfgang, Everything Everything, and Music Go Music.

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The local bands got by far the best crowds, but Music Go Music played a brutalistic stripped-back show, which condensed all the billowing fantasy-disco into a one-inch-punch of shimmer-inferno.

Wolfgang came up from London for it. We love his songs, but it feels like they haven’t quite got a grip of how it should materialise in the live setting – whether it’s a solo mega pop thing, or a crossover geetar band with him as the frontman. Half the band were shrouded in pitch black for most the set. Still, songs like ‘King And All His Men’ still offer the best indie snipe at the summit of mount chart pap we’ve heard all year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nh0AWlFYypQ

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Egyptian Hip Hop took home the winner’s ribbon though. There’s definitely something special happening there. Before they went on I had about four different people tell me they’d seen them in the past few months and insist that live they were something completely different, either a dream-techno band, a post-indie jam-collective, or a noise-punk troupe… As it turns out they were kinda all and none of the latter. They just had an amazing presence, they just didn’t seem to give a fraction of a fuck, and each track had mumuring hints of something amazingly melodic and hooky, yet meshed between shards of tribe-shirking doss-pop disorientation. It reminds me of the first few Klaxons shows where you just couldn’t tell if it would turn into a bizzaro art experiment or take over the world.

I had a little chat with EHH backstage afterwards:

(The douchey dude that gets in the way at the start is from that awful Ou Est Le Swimming Pool band).

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