The Neutrinos - Birds of Hell
Lee Harper
The Neutrinos are having fun. A lengthy, packed set goes by in a flash. Familiar and unfamiliar songs are performed with an amazing tautness. Karen Reilly’s voice remains incredible throughout and before you know it the band are encoring with Daft Punk Is Playing In My House, featuring both members of excellent support act Birds of Hell.
The gig is billed as a warm-up for the band’s mammoth run of 168 shows at the Edinburgh Fringe and they are, apparently, playing tonight with a stand-in drummer who’s had just two weeks to learn the songs. On the evidence of last night’s performance, they are a band in fine form who have been rehearsing hard for their trip to Scotland next month. A couple of minor stumbles aside, they career through a diverse range of songs, styles and volumes with breathtaking swagger.
Perhaps they are particularly at ease because they are playing to a packed home crowd, clearly in thrall to the band’s charms, or perhaps they are always like this. Either way they seem to alternate between austere solemnity and a playful, breezy cheerfulness as easily as their trademark switch between quiet and loud.
I enjoyed their performance a lot, nearly as much as I enjoyed the bizarrely brilliant suite of songs performed by Birds of Hell at the start of the evening: unicorns, musicians attempting to keep fit, rural Norfolk sex clubs, a low-key Tesco Express odyssey and a future Great Yarmouth lost to the North Sea – all this and more is packed into a blistering, energetic set of suitably deranged 21st century folk music. I could happily listen to a lot more of this stuff, and almost certainly will.
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