By Ewan Bissell
“It’s a sad and beautiful world.” - Mark Linkous
Music has a magical healing quality that can often find you at just the right time and just the right place. Everyone tends to find their own x factor when it comes to the art that they truly fall in love with. Whether its a playfulness, a soulful note or maybe more simply an open catharsis, the human spirit’s capacity to recover and grow has long been intertwined closely with the music we listen to.
Eva Penney
At Crofters Rights the crowds were filing through the door of the main stage for Eva Penny’s first full band backed gig. She stood on the stage, sporting a “Bikes suck” T-shirt, as the rest of the group assembled around her. The band wore shirts and ties like they’d been let out of college at lunch time – but only for one gig, so long as they were back in time for double maths.
I last saw Eva in that very same building – nearly three months prior at Nile Robinson & The Countrymen’s first headline show. She was back this time on the main stage, and something felt different.
It’s not obvious immediately. The band add to her music sparsely, the mood and atmosphere taking a precedence to an exploitation of her new found instrumental playground. The drummer pounds the bass drum or adds a flourish on some cymbals. The bass drives Penny forward but doesn’t go one way or the other. The keys produce this synthetic dream like noise, and it all loops around Eva, centre stage, her guitar her superpower. They kick into The Fight following their diminutive intro. I’m right here baby she sings to a gradually building crescendo. The chorus features this little pause, a rest that’s broken with a burst of guitar and drums and an enchanting vocal line. The pause is used later for a drum fill that’s like a little controlled explosion.
Eva’s ability to translate her emotionality to her stage performances has always been powerful and at times overwhelmingly beautiful, but her capacity to do so by incorporating a broader soundscape is truly impressive. Her lyrics are just as stunning. Literal poetry, like Springsteen or Bridgers her evocation of image and experience is so lucid: I come home to my wife at the end of another career/she screams in my face and she chews off my ear…
Penney toured us through sonatas of the sentimental including 7SA which featured a projection behind her of this collage of nostalgia of old flatmates. Moths was a touching tune about her adventures in the great outdoors with her father. She lamented about her lack of contact with nature recently. “I miss her” she said. The drummer came out from behind the kit and played an aching trumpet that cascaded over the rest of the band. But she saved the best till last.
Eva has this look, sort of like a tell when something’s about to happen. And just like that, her band don bike helmets (to match Penney’s t-shirt of course), smacking their heads against one another before the last tune, formerly known as The Chain Of Events That The Bicycle Started, but that night, was simply introduced as Bicycle Song.
The helmets were a playful, almost theatrical touch on a song that couldn’t bear its own weight when Eva played it alone. It takes on an art rock quality as the timbre and velocity rise and fall and Eva channels this gutteral emotion which is incredible to watch and to feel. The song is about a breakdown that took place seemingly years ago, but as anyone knows, you always carry that weight. It built up to various crescendos and leaves you emotionally exhausted, and completely reborn at its climax. I can’t wait to see where Eva goes next, because the chemistry she’s built up with this group of musicians now alongside her in such a short space of time is nothing short of sensational.
FFO: Ezra Furman, Sweet Juno, Black Country, New Road
Follow Eva Penney on Instagram @p3nny_coin17 and you can listen to
her debut EP – Don’t Be Alarmed If Anything’s Different - on
Part Time Models
After the break the six piece Part Time Models started their set. With a drummer at the back, five of them were strewn across the upstage – ukelele, cello, guitars and bass, and they opened as they meant to go on with Life’s Alright – a bold and passionately
declarative ballad that gives way to a soaring guitar solo.
The second half of the solo kicks up a gear, the rhythm behind it hastening before coming to a seemingly abrupt end, then lurching straight into another chorus. Part Time Models as a soulful, playful bunch at heart. It features a cute echoing guitar hook that plays through a gorgeous harmonised chorus.
Its an ear wormy pop tune that injected a spark of joy into the evening, though not entirely without a thread of melancholy running through it. Their first single, Kiora maybe
represented an origin rather than a destination.
George who had been on the ukelele switched to the guitar, and introduced the rest of the band which has three principle songwriters, each taking lead vocals on their respective songs… mostly. Rob stepped up for the next two tracks – slightly more attentive, careful affairs which exploited the group’s stellar chemistry, formal control and dynamics.
The descending guitar line on Waiting is a particularly touching note, matched by Rob’s somber vocals and Claire’s backing harking back to a folk tradition of ubiquitous, memorable melodies and words – I’m not giving up on love/I just need a little time. When the group falls under Claire’s lead, again the sound pivots, and you realise that even for their polished exterior, their a ragtag group, who at times are pulling in different directions, but it
makes for a ball of burgeoning energy on stage that is as exciting as it is heartfelt.
The cello haunts the whole set, as if it were a spectre in the background, but in flashes made itself known like an apparition. This play between the heard and the unheard lends an occult vibe to the collective that becomes more obvious the longer you look at them.
They top it all off with Country – a closing jangler that had everyone moving, and tied a nice bow on the evening as Claire, Rob, and George took turns singing verses, doling their almost intoxicating wisdom through an embracing country rocker.
FFO: George Harrison, The Magnetic Fields, Johnny Flynn, Whiskeytown
You can keep up to date with Part Time Models on Instagram
@_parttimemodels and you can listen to their debut EP – A Lot To Say About Nothing – on Spotify.
I must have been blessed by the music gods as I had the chance to they were a properly lovely bunch.
Caps (Drums) was loving it way too much on the merch stand, enthusiastically offering deals on shirts and tote bags that were by no means authorised by management. I asked him what his favourite song to play was and he kept switching his answer but eventually settled on their opener – Pile of Clothes for its dynamic qualities.
I should’ve been able to guess Grace’s favourite song from her outfit. Apparently she’s never taken her dungarees off, which is nice to hear considering the song came from a time when she was younger where she was afraid to wear them at all.
Grace wrote Dungarees at 16 during a tumultuous wear-your-own- clothes-day at school (apparently Mufti Day isn’t a thing inWales? Arguments were had.) and now four years on has released the single on Spotify. It’s a manifesto for doing what you want to do, and being who you want to be.
Will briefed me briefly on their plan to do a big t-shirt giveaway mid-gig before they were whisked away, and just as quickly they were on stage, at the head of a huge crowd.
Grace’s voice is utterly entrancing, kind of desperate and wobbly but she keeps close control over its emotiveness as it resonates around the room on opening cuts Pile of Clothes and The Cycle.
The latter song jumps around these little intricate drum fills and looks like a load of fun to play. The rhythm changes again and it gives this feeling of momentum to the whole show. It turns out this was Will’s first gig on guitar, and Tom’s (Bass) first gig with the group full stop. It’s a testament to their energy on stage and their relatability to their audience that they were able to dig out an indie pop show of such quality without getting into that gig groove.
And then, it was time for the t-shirt giveaway, which goes pretty much as you’d expect a t-shirt giveaway in Crofters Rights to go. Will spins a virtual wheel before prosaically announcing:
“Spike Rawling, you have won some shit!”
He wasn’t in the room, but arrived in the nick of time to collect his goodybag, which naturally sparked pandemonium in the crowd.
The gig went on but I was taken aback by Seeking a Saviour. An unassuming ballad with a vibrating lead guitar plucking its way around the room. Every now and then Grace’s voice slips into a yelp, and it just adds another little layer to these gorgeous performances. She lets out a sort of dignified ‘woo-hoo’ for a hook that is so soft and tender. Caps builds the drums as the song comes through, one fill in particular feels like a deep breath before a jump.
It’s a simple, mellow tune, but it has been built with such obvious devotion that by the end it plays on the heartstrings and it shares that quality with a song like Sea of Teeth by Sparklehorse, offering up a restorative feeling for to the soul.
They rounded out the show with the big single Dungarees – a fritzy playfulness and jump around vibe, and Mundane Sundays (also available on Spotify!) with this thick 80s guitar tone, think Siouxie or Echo & the Bunnymen. Alpaca’s own Ollie jumped into the room for the closers and declared Mundane to have the best bassline ever written.
He might have been right, but I didn’t have time to argue as The Pack wound down an emotional set. I rushed up to the stage to pinch a setlist. It was small enough to fold up and carry around in my wallet, a token for good times.
Really, I’d recommend this lovely bunch to every Bristol based indie lover, for their utterly charming attitude, unique musical blend, and flawless performances.
You can keep up to date with Grack Mack & The Pack on Instagram @grackmackandthepack and their latest track Dungarees is available on all streaming platforms
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