Live Review: The Phantom Band + Scanners @ The Macbeth 21/2/09

It’s rare that the support act trumps the headliner, but The Phantom Band are certainly giving it a go tonight at Twisted Licks. The Macbeth is swollen at the seams by nine, quite a feat for a Saturday night, and as the band come on the door staff have to resort to one-in-one-out. The amazing turn-out is for a good reason: The Phantom Band have finally ventured down from Glasgow to unleash prolonged, moody Scot-rock upon us London types, aided by more various and copious percussion instruments than you could shake a beater at. It’s almost reminiscent of music lessons at primary school, each band member equipping himself with a wooden hitty-shaky-scrapey stick that swaps hands during the set.

There’s nothing amateurish about The Phantom Band, though, whose quiet confidence imbues every feedback-laden guitar effect and each dark, layered chord. With six of them on stage, it’d be hard not to produce a sound thick with instrumentation, but this is achieved with such guile that disparate elements, including keyboards, melodica and synths, seem inseparably mashed.

The Phantom Band are, at times, as noisy as fellow Scots The Twilight Sad, but rhythmic preoccupations makes some songs more angular and anchored than their distortion-laden contemporaries. There’s something indelibly Scottish about the way frontman Rick Anthony plays the melodica, too, as though it’s a budget set of bagpipes held aloft to the mic. The audience absorbs walls of intoxicating sound through shifting tempos and keys, awestruck at the level of technical brilliance and talent that The Phantom Band have managed to hide for so long (they’ve been playing together for some six years now). This is a band destined for big things.

Scanners, meanwhile, were a band destined for big things some three years ago, but for one reason or another early hype about 2008’s album, ‘Violence Is Golden’, never quite delivered. The four-piece create punk-pop rock PJ Harvey would be proud of, saturated in friendly hooks, catchy melodies, and formulaic lyrics about nightmares and heartbreak and the like.

There’s confusion over what exactly they want to achieve though – Scanners aren’t quite filthy or raw enough to match Karen O and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, although frontwoman Sarah Daley is turning heads with her blunt cut black hair and slightly whiney rock vocal. Equally, if they want to court a pop market there needs to be less rock-star posturing, a la Howling Bells (whose comeback album this year smacks of watered-down, chart-hungry blandness). That ‘Lowlife’, one of their earliest tracks and already twice released without causing much bother, should still come off as their finest moment among much new material, speaks volumes.

Album Review - Scanners: Violence Is Golden

Musically schizophrenic four-piece, Scanners, have crafted a genre-elusive long-player with the re-release of their debut album Violence Is Golden, featuring four additional remixes. Sarah Daly’s searing, spitting vocals snare attention and prove capable of sculpting an arena of sound that is filled out by this mightily talented boy-boy-girl-girl outfit. But the album’s a bit of a puzzler. It explores a plethora of musical avenues, resulting in an aurally dizzying finished product: there are moments of inspired, biting, punk rock that wilt in the interim into the dreary plug-plug of ‘In My Dreams’, or twist into the strange, electronica and thick vocal harmony of ‘High Flier’.

Album opener, ‘Joy’, skids from feedback intro into grunge-rock gore, with eighties synths and a monosyllabic stop-start chorus, producing an overdone, outdated whole that hangs heavy off disjointed vocals. At other times Scanners shun grunge for the mystical, as with the psychedelic slide-guitar of ‘Evil Twin’, that sees Daly switch from screeching to soothing and seductive. Though eclecticism can make for excitement, this strange psychedelic twist is sandwiched between ‘Air 164’, a dirty, grinding Kills-esque number, and swathes of bubbling keyboard swoops in ‘Raw’, suggesting stylistic confusion more than genre evading genius.

The highlight, and a good place to start, comes in the shape of first single release ‘Lowlife’. There’s a clarity here lacking in the finished album, allowing Daley to execute gripping melodic shifts over a sophisticated guitar riff, balanced with piano punctuation and subtle violin strokes. A joyous bassline propels the track forward, eschewing both monotony and melodrama. Scanners slip easily into the quiet chug of the Cardigans in ‘Look What You Started’; Daley is just as accomplished at melancholic pleading as nasty squalling, and there’s a good lift here mid-track even if the effort seems a little tame surrounded by all that angry grunge.

The eponymous and ultimate ‘Violence is Golden’ entwines a rugged guitar riff with the waltzing fury of Daley screaming ‘a conflict of souls/a beautiful war’. Whilst this is typical of lyrics that tend to veer more towards insipid than insightful, it expresses rather adeptly Scanners’ predicament. Dark and seductively dirty, with moments of enthralling sonic exhilaration, Violence Is Golden loses cohesion in failing to consistently reproduce the tight outfit Scanners have perfected on some of their best tracks.