Showing a marked taste for red offset Fender guitars, French quartet Unschooling begin proceedings tonight. A side project of Rouen-based musical polymath Vincent Fevrier, the band play a rhythmic post-punk that dives between time signatures and skirts around the edges of dissonance. This is unexpected and exciting stuff.
New Yorkers The Wants are also a side project, this time of Madison Velding-VanDam and Heather Elle of Bodega, joined by drummer Jason Gates. Tonight Madison is sporting chaps, surely an underdeployed setpiece in the rock and roll wardrobe. There is a taut theatricism to their performance, with some moves from Madison that recall David Byrne’s Psycho Killer in Stop Making Sense.
Musically, theirs is a rhythmic territory that at its poppiest end, such as recent single Fear My Society, wouldn’t sound out of place in the early 2000s, but more generally takes on a post-punk energy washed in overdriven guitars and synths, shown off to great effect in current single Container. A great set from a band you are sure to be hearing more of this year.