LT Lief are originally from Canada and but they have been living in Glasgow for some time. Some music has been released already but a lot of these tracks (for example ‘Gentle Moon’ and ‘The Best’) were from a forthcoming release ‘Come Back to Me But Lightly’, available in January 2023.
Lief has gathered talented bunch of musicians around them, including some familiar faces such as Bart on bass and Ruiradh on guitar. Lief plays a mini-guitar, plugged in for some interesting effects, while they sing very sweetly. Despite this the songs are often quite skewed and eccentric, and when required the band can rock out with some muscular playing. One track ‘Brightest Part of the Room’ was sung a cappella, and overall Leif seemed pretty overwhelmed by the quiet attention and subsequent applause these eight tracks got.
Modern Studies performed tonight as a three-piece, with Emily on keys, Pete on bass and Joe on drums. It was mainly new material from a release due out next year, so there were a couple of bum notes (we only knew because Emily almost corpsed several times with laughter).
The stripped down sound emphasised in particular the drums, with Joe’s Mick Fleetwood tendencies to the fore! In fact as always they definitely have a bit of a Fleetwood Mac sound, via some some off-kilter Krautrock influences. New tracks included ‘Corridors’, ‘Won’t Belong’ and ‘Photograph’, although there were a couple of more familiar numbers alongside them.
One of the new tunes involved a fair amount of clapping which some audience members had already been briefed about (complicated!) – no encore as usual though as they had ‘run out of songs’ (don’t believe that!).
Credit due also to Gav who put in a great shift on sound, and as usual the great staff at this most wonderful venue.