Come on, try young: that’s the Gringo Records approach. Plainly, a night such as this would be unthinkable had it not been for [a]Mogwai[/a]’s singular influence on the jazz-under-any-other-name genre of post-rock. But against all odds, there’s a youth revolution waiting to happen.
And Glasgow’s Empire Builder are lighting the touchpaper. Fresh from recording their debut single in the Chemikal Underground studios, it’s more than possible that they’re being weaned to bolster the stables of Glasgow’s finest.
Empire Builder are defiantly highbrow, squeezing painstaking complexities out of the sparsest three-piece line up. The difficult ‘Trade In Fiction’ is riven with tempo changes, straying into as many blind alleys as open highways, but ‘Waters Of The Orient’ is a furious warping of Slint‘s ‘Good Morning, Captain’, and it’s here that Empire Builder‘s maddening complexities become utterly compelling. It’s not always easy to keep up, but Empire Builder understand the thrill of the chase.
Reynolds, sadly, never quite make the grade. After breaking down those trad-rock boundaries, they’ve forgotten to build up anything in their place. A little noisy hardcore, admittedly, but ‘Leviathan’ is the sort of thing that Idlewild could bash out over a lunch break. But then empty vessels always did make the most noise.