Water From Your Eyes live review: Village Underground sees off the last vestiges of genre
Is post-genre discourse boring? Much has been chuntered on about the supposed dissolution of the tried and tested labels and categories across musicland to neatly pigeonhole artists, but often it’s easy enough to glean some identifier or anchoring style to at least place an act’s record in the correct rack at Rough Trade.
However, it was next to impossible to shake off the genre gel at display for the artpop duo Water From Your Eyes’ headline show at London’s Village Underground in Shoreditch. The vast underground cavern of the venue slowly began filling with an eclectic cast of ticket holders, from bald blokes touching 60 to teens who you suspect may be attending their very first gig, all unified in intrigue for the show to come.
An easy mix of generations and backgrounds set the stage for the two very different supports. First on was Mui Zyu, an ethereal mist of dream guitars and violin sirens draped in electronic washes that cast a transportive spell over the audience. Such hypnagogic languor clashed with confounding spark against Morgan Garrett’s strobe-lighted scream project, an apocalyptic swallow of dark folk and thunderous metal bludgeon scoring the svelte yet commanding frontman’s Chernabog theatrics.
There was no way this was an accident. Far from the Form promoters’ last-minute panic smashing together of two unrelated supports alien to the programme, such disparate bookings both lay the foundations for the headliner’s naturally unclassifiable, ungovernable style, and further cemented the ultimate ebb of the genre.
To one’s left, the bookish indie girl was captivated by Garrett’s horror cacophony, to the right, the metalhead with a well-worn Black Sabbath T-shirt was swept up in Mui Zyu’s swaddling mist. Many in the room would have remembered the old subcultures of the early 1980s, perhaps had even been a committed New Romantic or sleeveless-denimed rocker, but such divides felt ever more ancient history in the run-up to the main event.
Taking the stage around 21:45, the Water From Your Eyes Brooklyn duo of Nate Amos and Rachel Brown, expanded to a live quartet by Fantasy of a Broken Heart’s Al Nardo and Bailey Wollowitz, entered the kaleidoscopic realm already circling in the air to unleash their mosaic hybrid blitz of dancefloor electronics and rock heft.
There was something of a sentimental resolution for the band, with Brown revealing, in between loose-tongued disses of other US towns they’d played, that the last time Village Underground had hosted them was two years ago, now standing as the opener.
Selling out the event, the eclectic crowd clearly loved the eclectic setlist. Anyone familiar with It’s a Beautiful Place’s piquant palette would have anticipated the unwieldy smorgasbord ahead, detours into country shimmer, engulfing shoegaze slack and dancefloor electronica all skittishly crumpled together with postmodern, yes, let’s use the P word, fever. Live, much of the material inexorably leaned in a beefier rock dimension, helped in no small part by Amos’ impeccable guitar chops, but the sonic clashes were still effortlessly conjured.
All held together by Brown’s playful nonchalance, Water From Your Eyes’ patchwork terrain weaved and bobbed with effortless glide, with Village Underground one moment hammered by the idiosyncratic alloy of skulking monologue and punk assault on ‘Life Signs’, blasted with the impishly euphoric digital rush of ‘Nights in Armor’, then rounded off with their pre-encore finale of ‘Playing Classics’ clubland donk. Such a mutoid setlist shone with chromatic magnetism, pulling everybody in with their jumbled stylistic grab bag.
What was it? No one could quite put a pin on it, but we all knew that it was good, which ultimately is music’s fundamental measure, whatever forms and shapes it takes. Gleefully taking a hatchet to peripheries and expectations, Water From Your Eyes and the evening they’d spun furthered their reputation for creative haphazardness in a manner that infected the whole room.
