Another year, another Scottish Alternative Music Awards ceremony.
Now firmly established at St Luke’s and with eight categories, Richy Muirhead’s university project is now in its 15th year (!). There are always some interesting, and often unknown to BM, nominations and always several decent live acts known or unknown.
You can read about who won what on the SAMAs website but let’s just say there were some surprises as usual… In terms of live acts the first up of the evening was Scottish/Zimbabwean artist Eyve, who blasted through several tracks with an thunderous electronic backing. Wear what BM assumes is a pretty unique take on tribal costume her power voice and sweeping dance moves were quite some spectacle (BM saw her briefly earlier in the year at Richey’s other event Pitch so knew roughly what to expect). Tracks like ‘Um Indecisive’ showed off some genuine musical talent which had to be seen to be believed.
After a few more awards we got some Theo Bleak. Appearing with a full band this Scottish-based artist has a vigorous take on indierock, with perhaps some Garbage/Alanis type vibes as well. She certainly rocked the house – BM isn’t exactly clear how many releases there have been (if any) but her sweet voice and slightly skewed lyrical take has a lot of potential and she has been gigging quite extensively.
The night ended off with the dizzyingly loud and visually frazzling performance by Glasgow’s own Helicon. While not exactly in the first flush of youth (sorry guys!) Helicon as a thing is kind of relatively new, developing over the course of several years as an outfit (pretty much all of them have been in other bands, some of them serially…). With a brand new set of visuals projected at the back and making full use of the larger stage, the eight (?) members spread themselves out, cranked up the volume to a ridiculous level and the huge beast that is the Helicon sound stirred into action. Howling guitar feedback (two solos at once at times), throbbing bass, some yelled vocals from JP, clattering drums, humming keyboards and as much sitar action as you could handle – it is hard to know what some of the less-experience in the audience made of this baptism of fire…BM did see Blanck Mass pretty much clear the room at the end of the SAMAs a few years ago and while this didn’t quite have the same effect it is fair to say that only the more hardened and hard-core made it to the end of the performance!
Overall a great night much enhanced by a great variety of live acts – well done to Richy and the team, probably the best ever!
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