Formed out of free jazz listening parties in a communal house, Philadelphia’s Empath make music like Jackson Pollock approached art. Various ingredients are hurled with gleeful abandon and beauty emerges from what could initially seem like chaos.
Here, drummer Garrett Koloski fires off a deconstructed disco beat while keyboard players Emily Shanahan and Randall Coon emit twittering bird noises and what sounds like the hypnotic hum of an electric pylon. Stagefront, singer/guitarist Catherine Elicson shudders with her instrument, her jerkily melodic chords and sweet, delicate vocals bringing focus and pop melodies to what could otherwise be a glorious haze.
This approach – showcased on their recent debut, Active Listening: Night On Earth – has led Rolling Stone to call them “America’s most inventive young psychedelic band” and made the effervescent quartet one of the buzziest bands in US indie. In the UK, they’re under the radar and playing above a pub to 20 people, but the noise-pop quartet certainly offer something refreshing.
Their anarchic maelstrom is similar in spirit to Nick Cave’s Birthday Party and Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band, although musically they sound like neither. Hulking drummer Koloski is pivotal. All vest, sweat and tattoos, the big man pounds a kit half his size, fires off machine-gun drum rolls and at one point is audibly, loudly cackling as the band’s exultant racket becomes a punk rock take on bebop jazz. However, at the core are some sharp, infectious pop songs, initially written on acoustic guitar but which now rifle through the genres. Electronic riffs collide with church organs and surf punk. Fairground, whirling synths propel the catchy pysch-pop Soft Shape and the slightly Cure-like Hanging Out of Cars, the latter’s lyric (“Hanging out of cars on the freeway”) capturing their free-spirited outlook. Roses That Cry channels 1960s girl groups into Sonic Youth with such joyous effervescence it’s impossible not to smile. Elicson, sporting a chic, short mullet, doesn’t say a word all night beyond a mumbled “Thank you”, but her band walk off to considerable applause and surely bigger things.
• At the Hug & Pint, Glasgow, tonight, then touring.
