Replicas
Old Blue Last, London
Saturday July 9 2011
Up the road in Shoreditch Park, The 1234 Festival is winding down. But we've skipped the last bands of the festival day to scuttle along to the Old Blue Last, and catch the first band at the 1234 after-party.
There's more than one band here tonight, of course - and more than one after-party, come to that. There are 1234-related shindigs happening all over the East End tonight. But sometimes it pays to be selective. And right now, I select Replicas.
Most people, it seems, are still on the festival site. The Old Blue Last is half empty and lit only by a couple of feeble blue LED units, which lends the place an eerie closing-time feel - some achievement since the doors have only just opened. It's almost as if we're not really supposed to be here. When Replicas appear on stage, plug in, and start up, for a moment I'm not sure if this is their actual set, or if I've inadvertently gatecrashed the soundcheck.
But no, this is the real thing. There are two Replicas, and you might recognise one of them: Helena Gee was previously in Silhouette, while Ashiya Eastwood wasn't. Between them, they take care of guitar, bass, keyboards and vocals, but that nuts-and-bolts description doesn't do justice to Replicas' music. It's like blue light rendered in sound - appropriately enough, given the Old Blue Last's too-literal stage lighting. Drifts of synthpop mist, backed by minimalist but implacable beats. Out of this, the songs emerge.
For a band that likes to keep things sparse, Replicas generate an impressive swell of sound. Guitar chimes and climbs and scrabbles and shivers over the electronics, sometimes spiky, sometimes draped like a sheet of sonic velvet. On top of all that, two voices, sometimes marching together, sometimes going their own ways. The ingredients are simple, and deliberately minimalist - the beats never get busy, never clutter the landscape, and yet there's a quitetly powerful force at work here.
Sometimes, when the guitar hangs back and lets the electronics have their head, there's almost a stripped-back krautrock element to the sound, like Death In Vegas in their more exiguous moments. But then that blue-light guitar
comes skittering in again, and the whole thing gains substance like a salt crystal growing in a cup of saline solution. 'In The City' is a melancholy marching song, as bleak as winter Manchester, the guitar building as the song progresses like a gathering snowstorm.
But it's 'Hearts Beat' that is probably the best one-song encapsulation of everything Replicas do. A fleetingly brief but deceptively tough ballad, it wears a moodily pensive expression but you just know it's got a heart of unyeilding metal. Replicas are are tougher than they look. Underneath their blue velvet, there lurks blue steel.
Replicas: Website | MySpace | Facebook
For more photos from this gig,
find Replicas by name here.
