Out Of The Blue, Edinburgh
3 stars
“Hold hands. Touch each other. Us first,” is the advice of Amii Gold, diminutive heel-skip-kicking chanteuse with Glasgow four-piece Make Model as they inject some speak-easy intimacy into Out Of The Blue’s high-ceilinged drill-hall interior. They’re not being twee. Indeed, despite the boomy acoustic, Make Model’s is a sound triumphal enough to aspire to wide-open panoramas.
Given their roots in their adopted home town’s DIY jangle-pop aesthetic, such clear-eyed ambition is an anomaly. As is the big EMI van parked outside what was intended as a low-key multi-media art-house happening organised by young shavers indie haunt I Fly Spitfires in association with Found’s equally self-determined Surface Pressure label.
Having played a big part in the evening’s audio-visual elements, Found’s thunder on the day after the release of their new album, This Mess we Keep Reshaping, is slightly stolen by Make Model’s impending pop stardom. Their 57 varieties of Woodstockian art-school stoner-funk filtered through The Beta Band, Traffic and Wings, however, is a chipper enough musical soup.
With dates supporting Malcolm Middleton ongoing and single The Was their first major label release, Make Model are already a winningly confident ensemble. Gold and co-vocalists Gordon Skene and Lewis Gale spar in a manner that’s both life-affirming and doleful, driving each song home in a way which, in a stadium setting, might just be Arcade Fire euphoric.
If we’re talking musical cycles, now early 1980s art-pop has gone mainstream, we’re in the follow-up era of something equally charming, only better produced, verging on glossy, but which never quite lives up to its potential. If Make Model do, this hand-touching experience might be the last the underground sees of them.
The Herald, May 6th 2007
ends
3 stars
“Hold hands. Touch each other. Us first,” is the advice of Amii Gold, diminutive heel-skip-kicking chanteuse with Glasgow four-piece Make Model as they inject some speak-easy intimacy into Out Of The Blue’s high-ceilinged drill-hall interior. They’re not being twee. Indeed, despite the boomy acoustic, Make Model’s is a sound triumphal enough to aspire to wide-open panoramas.
Given their roots in their adopted home town’s DIY jangle-pop aesthetic, such clear-eyed ambition is an anomaly. As is the big EMI van parked outside what was intended as a low-key multi-media art-house happening organised by young shavers indie haunt I Fly Spitfires in association with Found’s equally self-determined Surface Pressure label.
Having played a big part in the evening’s audio-visual elements, Found’s thunder on the day after the release of their new album, This Mess we Keep Reshaping, is slightly stolen by Make Model’s impending pop stardom. Their 57 varieties of Woodstockian art-school stoner-funk filtered through The Beta Band, Traffic and Wings, however, is a chipper enough musical soup.
With dates supporting Malcolm Middleton ongoing and single The Was their first major label release, Make Model are already a winningly confident ensemble. Gold and co-vocalists Gordon Skene and Lewis Gale spar in a manner that’s both life-affirming and doleful, driving each song home in a way which, in a stadium setting, might just be Arcade Fire euphoric.
If we’re talking musical cycles, now early 1980s art-pop has gone mainstream, we’re in the follow-up era of something equally charming, only better produced, verging on glossy, but which never quite lives up to its potential. If Make Model do, this hand-touching experience might be the last the underground sees of them.
The Herald, May 6th 2007
ends
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