Embrace + One Sided Horse + Glass Mountain @ The Copper Rooms, Coventry, 17th December 2016

It’s a rare night this evening. Me and my brother rarely touch musically but tonight I’m listening to him and taking his recommendation. Embrace are a band I know, and believe I’ve seen them in the past, although my little book of gigs doesn’t show me anything. The two supports however, I am unaware of, other than hearing him extolling their virtues. So here we are at a gig with both of us observing. The gigs we’ve attended together, other than with him on stage, probably number the eggs in a box. Earlier in the week he had added me to a closed Facebook group for Embrace followers and what had fast become apparent is that these are not ordinary fans. These are dedicated fans in a similar way that New Model Army fans are. Some of these guys treat an Embrace tour as a holiday, travelling from city to city attending every gig. They organise lifts for each other when people cannot get to a gig, driving out of their way to pick people up. That love for the band becomes entirely apparent when the band finally hit the stage.

So, here we are, pitching up at a venue that is new to me. The staff are friendly and very helpful, the venue, intimate feeling for a mid sized venue. The ceiling is low and the stage wide. There is a reasonably large crowd here from the time the doors are opened and they are there to give air time to Glass Mountain.

The band take to the stage and and for the first three songs they fight a less than perfect sound, but as this settles the quality of the band comes quickly to the fore. The song writing and arrangements are strong. Bassist and keyboard player Mickey Dale is in for a busy night tonight as he is a member of all three bands, but the strength of this band is Harry Hanson. Hunched over his guitar and mic he comes across as tortured artist with the songs confessional and open. Slow on tempo, the majority of the songs move along at a pace to match the title of their début EP; Glacial. This is no criticism. The songs work with this slow tempo. They smoulder like embers before suddenly sparking into flames as though a blast of oxygen has hit. Beautifully crafted songs in the same vein as their influence, Codeine, and that band are an excellent reference point.

Harry’s fingers dance across his fretboard pulling shapes that can only come from some kind of jazz or formal learning background. His voice, or at least the way that he phrases some of his lyrics, have another reference point that I can’t quite convince myself that I am correct in hearing. It’s only a few days later that I have the CDEP on the car stereo when The Smiths loving girlfriend points out, without prompting, what I thought that I had heard. He has a subtle Morrissey like phraseology. The gig is well received and I have to believe that we will be seeing more of these guys in the future. For now, check out the Glacial EP. Quality!

The second band of the night take to the stage without fanfare and the unknowing, were there any here, could be forgiven for being confused. One Sided Horse are in fact Embrace without singer Danny, replaced by Evil Blizzard member Mark Whiteside. That is somewhat unfair as the band is a Whiteside solo project with the Embrace boys taken on board for it rather than the other way around.

OSH play a pared down version of the big soaring anthems of Embrace. Arpeggio led guitar tunes with an under layer of keyboard. The instrumentation lays a foundation for the vocals and sometime acoustic guitar of Mark Whiteside but it is those vocals that define the band. Warm, deep and syrupy they ooze across the aforementioned foundation. The warm confidence gives a feel of Nick Cave singing over a less orchestrated Bad Seeds and indeed, a couple of later songs would sit well on all of the first half a dozen Bad Seeds albums (bar ‘Kicking Against The Pricks’).. A pitch perfect duet with a young singer called Evie showcases what a fine voice Whiteside has. Having post-gig researched OSH I can confirm that I’m not the only one seeing this, with other comparisons being Nick Drake and Johnny Cash. An album was released earlier this year and I’m sold on this performance enough to be planning on tracking it down.

This night was shaping up into a superb show from a diverse and inspiring line-up. My brother has the greater knowledge on Embrace and as they take to the stage I leave you in his capable hands for the rest of this review….

Embrace fans are a passionate bunch, something which is not lost on the band. They often return this passion tenfold and the reward tonight was one of the most heartfelt and accomplished performances I’ve seen. I count myself as a fan so in the name of objectivity let’s be balanced about this, let’s just pause to get the negatives out of the way….right, that’s quite long enough.

There’s not much pomp and ceremony with Embrace and they stride onto the stage like a band confident in what they do. They open tonight with Protection, the first song on the latest and sixth album and the New Order electronica inspired vibe settled the audience and band. This opening song choice really gave the second song, All you Good Good People, space to breathe and they play it like an encore. Had they walked off stage after the second song, they would’ve already used a whole gig’s worth of energy and passion right there.

The fluid guitar of Richard Mcnamara starts In The End, another live favourite and there was no let up in the enthusiasm and momentum. Normally a band in the first few songs will rush through everything following the injection of adrenaline simply by being on stage, but not so with Embrace. Perhaps they had the space they needed because of the crowd singing every single word of all the first three songs, a participation normally reserved for a finale. And quite how they managed to rustle up the energy to continue from the peak where One Sided Horse left off, given that four fifths of OSH are Embrace, is testament to their professionalism and passion.

Another song from the sixth album of 2014, Follow You Home, hears the audience in fine voice and the Richard McNamara sung vocal gives a dynamic shift to the proceedings.Often with a band they will rely on their old favourites, sprinkled throughout the set, to prop up the enthusiasm. Embrace are no exception, but they certainly don’t rely on them, they don’t need to. They breathed new life into the back catalogue and they sound like they’ve been re born. Come back to What You Know or CBTWYK for those in the know, was one of these older songs and it was a magnificent early crescendo in the first part of the set. I say this because out came a new song after this.

Now, if you hadn’t been to their award winning secret festival back in rainy Yorkshire in September and bought the EP this song appeared on, you’d be forgiven for standing and listening trying the get a handle on it. Before they played the song, front man Danny Mcnamara, took the opportunity to update us on the progress with the 7th album, telling us in the typical understated way that us Yorkshire folk like to speak, “It’s really good” If you’re used to this understated northern demeanour you’ll know what he really means. Advising us of the lyrics to the chorus of Love is a Basic Need, everyone joined in. It’s immediate hook demanded more crowd participation. For those who hadn’t heard it already, Danny kindly reminded us that a new song is an old song that we haven’t met yet.

I confess to having a weak bladder and so choose my least favourite Embrace song to pay a visit and I make humble apologies to the 99% of Embrace fans who love the song, Save Me……as the last notes of the song rang out, I wandered back from the toilet with two things on my mind, 1) it’s probably a pretty poor view from the back of this venue and 2) Perhaps I should give this song a chance because everybody else seems to like it. The band and the audience had a bit of breather after all that dancing, they are getting on a bit after all, though you wouldn’t know it! I do hope Mickey Dale gets a good rest over Christmas, he played in all three bands tonight!

Danny then introduced the next song by telling us how he read on Facebook that there are no strangers if you like the same music. and that it was “really apt for you lot ‘cos you’re all one big family” and we found ourselves dragged back into life by the dirty wah-wah of Richard Mcnamara’s opening riff and we all got carried away again. This was a more rock’n’roll heavier version of this old favourite and was all the better for it. I think something clicked and to borrow a phrase from the Flamenco of Spain, we witnessed a duende, a moment where everything came magically together. I like to think, that right there we heard what Embrace sounded like back in 1998 when they played this in rehearsals when no one was listening.

Another new song from the latest EP was introduced in the form of the The White Alien, a reference of sorts to a long time mysterious helper of the band. With it’s easier chorus hook line ‘We’ll only make it together’ it was much more accessible, though I confess to having listened to it many times. The vocals on this song are fragile and emotional and occupy a space much higher than the ceiling of this venue. The gospel like Someday starts the last three old favourites followed by Gravity and Ashes and provides a glorious bookend to the energetic and emotional set. Danny took a moment during the final bars of Ashes seemingly to take in all they had achieved that night, and I’ll wager all the band had achieved over the last two decades. I swear that from where I was stood it looked like he had a tear in his eye. I know I did.

The encore saw a beautiful outing of Fireworks, a song they don’t play live all that often, though I did enjoy it at Sheffield earlier in the week and it really didn’t sound twenty years old. The audible hum of excitement when Danny introduced it and the keys man Mickey Dale stroked the introduction to life brought the audience into fine voice. `That collective voice was needed for the second of the three song encore when Richard McNamara sang Refugees and barely had the voice to keep going to the end. This was a man whose soaring backing vocals alongside those of Mickey Dale had been a constant companion to Danny’s excellent vocals tonight, and he’d run out of steam, and no one cared. Not one bit.

We were left with the last song of the very first album ‘The Good Will Out’ a song of positivity out of adversity and we all sang along. Tonight we witnessed a band in love with music, wiling to take chances and holding every single one of our hands as we held them aloft the entire night.

 

Regular reviewer : Mark Veitch

Guest reviewer : Phillip Veitch

Photographs: Chris Bowley

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