These New Puritans @ Bush Hall - January 25th 2010

Written by Kelly

Photography and review by Elinor Jones

The trouble with photographing gigs is that you loose sight of why you started doing it in the first place. The more you get commissioned to cover gigs, the fewer you like. It’s inevitable; you’re no longer taking photos in order to try and capture the energy of music you’re enjoying. Instead you’re being sent to photograph those that are getting hyped by the press or who are likely to be. It’s a matter of numbers - there are bound to be bands who bore, frustrate or irritate you and sometimes, without naming names, it seems these by far outweigh the others.

Every now and then you need a shake up and tonight at Bush Hall I got one - when you walk into a room and see a 6ft taiko drum on one side of the stage, a brass and woodwind ensemble on the other and a load of samplers separating them, you know you’re in for an interesting time. Tonights gig is the special airing of the new album ‘Hidden’. The audience is excited, some have travelled a fair distance - I can see some regular faces of the Southend scene - and it’s near impossible trying to get in a position where I have a clear view of the band through the camera - after a while I end up perilously perched with a foot on the speaker stack.

The band [minus Sophie] walk onstage to ‘Time Xone’, an unnerving melancholic woodwind piece that sets you on edge, but in no way prepares you for the almighty sucker punch of ‘We Want War’ to follow. Live this sounds massive; layers of brutal, raw beats and a sub bass to make The Wu jealous. If you shut your eyes and just felt the vibrations and heard the sample of the sword being unsheathed you’d picture GZA and friends onstage, not 3 skinny boys from Essex. But there are many more dimensions to their new sound being premiered tonight; delicate maudlin bassoon, children singing, crunching samples, digital beats dancing around George Barnett’s unrelenting driving rhythms and Jack Barnett’s quiet ranting vocals. Onstage Jack seems far more comfortable than at previous gigs; signalling instructions to the ensemble and the rest of the band - weaving these elements together. However that’s not to say he actually looks comfortable, he’s still an akward, skittish presence, a reflection of the music, constantly stalking the stage, but it’s a vast improvement on previous gigs i’ve shot - one in New Cross where he lay on the floor for two and a half songs with his hands covering his face. In contrast George looks at home behind the drums, rightly set to the side of the stage in full view. He plays with an infectious energy that’s a joy to watch.

Other stand out songs in the set were ‘Attack Music’ - which does pretty much what it says in the title, ‘White Chords’ with it’s whistful vocal and their encore of Infinity from the old album. Trying to describe the new material might sound like I was just listing random words; funereal, dancehall, maudlin, confrontational, elegant and pop are some things that spring to mind. Tonight TNPS successfully trod a very delicate path, with all the diverse influences and flavours mixed together in such a discordant way the result could have been one almighty pretentious mess, instead it was exciting, challenging and rewarding. It’s the start of the year and a new decade - fingers crossed there’ll be many more gigs of this standard to come. If i’m going to go deaf for my trade I want to do it listening to something put together by a wild imagination preferably underpinned by precise, meticulous beats [and a lot of sub] please.

set list:

time xone
we want war
swords of truth
3000
orion
hologram
attack music
fire - power
drum courts
white chords
5
infinity

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