Music > Live Reviews

Peace

The Adrian Flux Waterfront

19/05/18

Limerick-based whenyoung singer Aoife Power was cool as a cucumber on an Antarctic expedition. She sported a red beret, baggy pin-striped suit jacket à la magician’s apprentice and a white bass that she played with the familiarity of a fifth limb. Complementing her look was guitarist Niall Burns bedecked in a boiler suit (sleeves rolled up) tailored with fabric badges and scrawled with graffiti, giving him the appearance of an extra from Red Dwarf.

Their sound lived up to their image. Ethereal, seductive, then ramping things up with some heavy riffs and drum beats and all the while permeated by Power’s voice trickling through like nightingale song. Niall and Aoife jammed with the familiarity of friends who have grown up rehearsing in their parents’ garage and cracked out one banging tune after another. But they were just as on the pulse with knowing when to strike a serious chord and a highlight of their set was Power dedicating one song to victims of the Grenfell tower fire and “all those who are shunned and forgotten” before diving into the song. Despite only performing five songs during their set, whenyoung held their own with a rugged charm shot through with melancholy urgency.

Some time passed. Peace traipsed in with shaggy dog hairdos circa The Beatles’ Blue Album and cheekbones that cut the air with a loud hissing noise as they swished on stage. The Koisser brothers were on form that night, dressed somewhere half-way between cowboys and Byronic poets – Samuel in a shimmering gold Western-style shirt with black epaulets and Harrison in a black blouse and leather skinnies studded up the hem with metal suns.

Harrison packed more than enough suave and mystique as the lead singer and, between swapping out guitars after each song like discarded lovers and singing so close to the mic that he appeared to be giving it mouth-to-mouth, he seemed to totally surrender and offer himself up to the music. Nothing about the act seemed stale, nor did it feel as if they felt they’d played their sound to death, as it clearly does at some gigs. Instead, the tracks Power, Money and 1998 were fresh from the can as if they were drawing up inspiration for them on the spot and spunking forth the sound in an artistic coital frenzy.

Somewhere around You Don’t Walk Away From Love, a rather cute mini mosh-pit developed at the centre of the crowd and perhaps it was testimony to Peace’s indie rock/softcore post-punk sound, but the shoving and restless jumping seemed almost respectful, half gentle and quintessentially British.

For the track Angel, the rest of the band cleared the stage and left Harrison there, soaked in a bloody hue, a halo of dappled light illuminating him from a single beam, marking him out as Lucifer cast down from the heavens to play on this stage, in this moment, just for us.

Few bands are as refreshing to watch live as Peace, who were a cool Piña Colada sip of inoculation to the lukewarm and overwrought genre of indie rock.