Walter Schreifels

Glasgow King Tut's Wah Wah Hut
Friday 2nd April

Walter Schreifels

When his post-hardcore band made their long anticipated comeback in 2008, King Tut’s was sold out and sweaty. Returning on his own to promote a solo side project, Walter plays to a much thinner and more reserved crowd – but captivates just as hard with nothing but an acoustic guitar and a voice.

His charming, laid back and polite demeanour seems at odds with his rock background, as do covers of Smiths songs, and stories about girl friends who can’t get boyfriends. In fact, the surprising thing quickly becomes his ability to flip back to post-hardcore dude for the handful of Rival Schools songs he performs.

Although obviously sounding completely different played on an acoustic guitar, on ‘Good Things’, ‘Used For Glue’ and ‘Travel By Telephone’, Schreifels gets a gravel in his voice and performs with such vigour that you can tell he’s playing along with the full band versions in his head.

His quaint and cosy singer songwriter material that makes up his ‘An Open Letter To The Scene’ album is lovely, but it’s the character and personality that he puts in to the performance that stands out more than the tunes themselves.

Walter charms an impressive chunk of the crowd into buying the CD and queuing for autographs and photos afterwards; and promises a new Rival Schools record later in the year.

Manchester Orchestra

Glasgow Barrowland
Saturday 6th November

With two albums under their belt and a pretty dedicated following of their own, Manchester Orchestra seemed completely out of their comfort zone playing to a room of restless Biffy Clyro fans.
Manchester Orchestra

Their sound is a much more delicate thing than that of the headliners, and unfortunately not a lot of the Barrowlands crowd are in the mood for listening.
As if to acknowledge this fact, Manchester Orchestra play a mere five songs – their set just short of half an hour. In comparison to headline shows, this must be pretty much like pulling the plug on them just as they’re getting in to their stride.

Playing four songs from their latest album, Mean Everything To Nothing – with the beautiful Where Have You Been from their first album thrown in for good measure, everything sounds impeccable. Every quiet loud transition is delivered just as it should, every vocal is delivered with heartbreaking vulnerability, and those in the room with the manners to pay attention provide applause that gets consistently louder as the set unravels.

While the band wisely focus most of their energy on the more instant songs in their repetoire, perhaps their 6 minute mini-epics are just too heavy going and serious for a Biffy support band. Not playing their two and a half minute gem The Only One seems like a missed trick, and one they could almost certainly have slipped in without going noticeably over their allocated stage time.

Despite the tepid response, Manchester Orchestra proved themselves to be a band certainly worth seeing, and masters at their art. Although we’d rather see them in front of their own crowd next time.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Jack’s Mannequin

Glasgow QMU
Monday August 31

Hyperactive Andrew McMahon has plenty reasons to be cheerful tonight – he sold out King Tuts, got boosted up to the QMU – and judging by how densely packed even the balcony seems to be, can’t be far off capacity here too. more… “Jack’s Mannequin”

Bell X1

Glasgow King Tut's
Thursday 21st May

Most bands, when they start to get a bit of commercial success, succumb to the nice, comfy lifestyle and write more obviously commercial songs. Bell X1, on the other hand, seem to be getting weirder. more… “Bell X1”