Live Review: Squid – Somerset House, London 08/07/2022
Headlining tonight’s host of genre-bending artists are post-punk five-piece Squid, whose fiery energy, evidenced in their debut LP, Bright Green Field, promises a live experience that will melt minds.
The air grows close, the sun fades, and luminous blue beams light the neo-classical structure that houses tonight’s event. An impeccable, Georgian-era piece of architecture, Somerset House makes its inevitable impression; Squid’s drummer and lead vocalist, Ollie Judge, can’t suppress his awe as he takes in his surroundings: “this place is pretty nice, isn’t it?”
Two hours prior, as the space between these four walls gradually thins, first support act, Kai Campos, opens with a DJ set that might be best definable as experimental house, though it’s likely that any concrete label would underrepresent the cocktail of influences that permeate the sound. Boasting tropical bouncy rhythms that wouldn’t sound out of place on a 1980s Nigerian disco track, combined with house-like pianos glitching and dipping beneath the kick’s perpetual pump, Kai mixes the synthesized with the primal, making a sonic note of his role in Mount Kimbie’s electro-fused outfit.
His performance sets the tone for the night’s less obvious, but quintessential facet, this being an egalitarian approach to genre. Bar italia run this baton for the next 30 minutes, their eclectic blend of indie rock, grunge, and folk drawing ever more heads toward the stage. This blend of two artists, NINA and two-piece Double Virgo, each as idiosyncratic as the next, maintain their mystery via whole-hearted abstinence from any means of spotlight. It’s as if they don’t want you to find their music, as though compositions of this calibre should only belong to the ears of those who are truly dedicated to good vibrations, and who possess the necessary will to hunt them down. In this vein, the group cruise through a number of their modern cult classics (‘miracle crush’, ‘Mariana Trenchrock’, ‘rage quit’) with their heads down and eyes aimed anywhere but the crowd - an introversion that only adds to their allure. Veering slightly from their studio recordings in tempo and harshness of guitar, the group lace their performances with grungy, foot-stomping tones that rattle a curious crowd. From those endorphin-inducing opening notes of their biggest hit, ‘skylinny’, to the impassioned, jingling finale, ‘Banks’, the group tow a flawless line between outlandish and catchy, summoning artistically cathartic ear-worms.
The set’s grungy twang is given regular intervals for slower tracks like ‘angels’ and ‘fffffroffing’, both of which evidence the group at their most brilliant. Sporting trademark, winding guitar riffs that loop indefinitely throughout each tune, Sam, Jez, and Nina just freestyle, riding the loops in an incredibly raw, expressive manner, almost as though they’re improvising. Like Big Boi and Andre 3k, Sam and Nina go verse for verse, bringing intriguing new meanings to the basslines and guitar loops beneath them. This hold and release of tension throughout their recordings is brought to the fore at Somerset House, with strained, untrained vocals providing a welcomed relief from the trained up, pitch-perfect, ‘The Voice’-type vocal we hear so often. Crooning and gliding, pumped with psychedelia, every instrument played by this band, vocals included, makes for a distinct music experience.
Next is another short interlude from Kai, whose soaring 909 percussion pays tribute to electronic titan Aphex Twin, and aptly warms up the crowd for Squid’s ambient-electronic fused opener. What begins as an enveloping wall of noise, slowly mutates into a snareless, jazz-punk frenzy, where trumpets, thrash-y plug-ins, and high-end percussion vie for top spot in the mix. In usual Squidian fashion, the repeated cynical refrain (‘to live inside your dream’) grows in volume and anger, carrying us nimbly onto the next track, ‘Paddling’, which exercises perhaps even murkier lyrical treatment. The chorus’, ‘There are people, there are people inside’ and ‘Don’t push me in!’ are belted with such intent and charisma that the darker, fear-of-the-outside-of-your-comfort-zone themes are overwhelmed by the track’s wild, dissonant euphoria.
The following track, lesser known, ‘Undergrowth’, continues to elaborate on their post-punk sound, with angular, fast paced, yet soulful guitars paying tribute to the post-punk royalty by whom they are surely inspired. With the aforementioned guitar-work, polyrhythmic bongos, crooning trumpet, and Ollie’s beautiful wailing vocals, Squid are the 21st Century’s answer to, and the musical lovechild of, the Talking Heads and Fugazi. It is important to Squid themselves, though, that the band remain uninhibited by the pigeonhole-bait that is genre. Indeed, post-punk is a fitting genre classification for Squid, as it embodies a punk sound influenced by literally all and any other genre, which in Squid’s case involves jazz, funk, grunge, rock, pop, ambient, spoken word, rap, and electro, respectively. However, Ollie himself wishes music consumers weren’t so keen to label things, and considers ‘inconsistency’ (New Yorker) as being the only tangible consistency in their music. Take ‘Undergrowth’, for instance, which, having progressed into a vicious, cacophonous punk head-banger, finally deflates into a heavenly jazz hubbub, where tempo-agnostic cymbal hits attribute unorthodox rhythm to trumpet harmonies fitting of a Bill Evans joint. As long as it doesn’t make sense, it makes sense to Squid – it’s liberating.
Before long, Squid jump into the hits. The jerky, off-kilter guitars (on ‘Boy Racers’) that open tonight’s first encounter with Bright Green Field (Squid’s acclaimed debut LP), send the crowd into hypnotic, primitive fever, and mosh pits soon follow. There is an anger, a controlled intensity on Ollie’s face as he belts his spoken word (‘boy racers in our dreams tonight!’) that, were he not exercising the discipline required to maintain his drum kit’s rhythm, could easily spiral into total mania. This mastery of their wild energy continues through to fan-favourite, ‘G.S.K.’ As we are launched into the track’s peppy beginning, Louis Borlase (guitar, bass, vocals) honours the studio recording, grabbing a cow bell and whacking it viciously. The metronomic timing he exhibits, in spite of his erratic movement, is a visual nod to JK Simmons’ infamous ‘not quite my tempo’ motif in Whiplash, wherein Simmons tests Miles Teller’s tempo with brutal cowbell treatment. I can feel Louis’ hunger – not often does a cowbell give you goosebumps.
The final thirty minute stretch is a psychedelic journey, wherein their jazz-esque tendencies are at the forefront. Sonically, the band never steps in the same direction – no 2nd bar is the same as the last. There are mixtures of cockerel-like trumpet falsetto, dotted techno drones (pioneered by Anton Pearson (guitar, bass, vocals, percussion), who is contorted like Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood over a mixer on the floor), and haunting, howled wails contributed by Martha Skye Murphy during the set’s final cry, ‘Narrator’. As the stage lights sparkle and the wall of industrial humming crescendos, Ollie is stood with his back to the crowd, launching his drum sticks at his MPC, each boing buzzing the monitors.
Along with Kai’s catered selections and bar italia’s raw, endearing beauty, Squid truly altered how I view a gig’s potential to elate and entrance a gathering of humans.
Words by George Saxon
Photography by Abigail Shii
