(((O))) Live: Hater – Signature Brew, Haggerston

I’ve never been to a gig prefaced by runners before, but here I am at Signature Brew in Haggerston, being surrounded by athletic types in side-striped shorts cramming post-5k beers before the show starts and looking gently confused by the stage setup. It is quite the setup. Well, the stage itself is unremarkable, but in front of it juts out a couple of tables laden heavy with synth equipment, bells, screens, sheet music, and then, to the side, an enormous bass drum. Whichever of the line-up all of this belongs to must be a many-peopled group, I’m sure.

It isn’t the first support, Ella Raphael, who is only joined on stage by one other musician, a cellist. Raphael herself wields an electric guitar, plucked minimally and delicately, in time with her gentle sways. Her voice is earnest, bright, lilting and complemented quite beautifully by the Omnichord that makes a one-song appearance under her strumming fingers.

Each set, apparently, is being filmed and photographed simultaneously (equipment is juggled and thankfully un-dropped) by someone quite burdened with camera tech. The video camera is mounted on a one-footed pogo-stickish mount.

Up next is the support billed on the fliers only as “special secret guest”. This is the owner of the elaborate set-up. The remarkably solo owner: accomplished composer Graham Reynolds, responsible for, amongst near innumerable others, the film scores of A Scanner Darkly and Before Midnight. With this sprawled equipment, he plays works from his latest project The Portcullis, which, as he prologues like a one-man Shakespearian chorus, was inspired by his familial links to the UK and its castles. Reynolds delivers a set of dark ambient ‘dungeon-synth’, whirlwinding between the many instruments laid before him. His playing is violently impassioned, tossing sheet music aside and hurling objects at the drum in lieu of using hands or sticks, and it’s absolutely captivating to watch.

 

And in another breakneck tone shift, headliners Hater are on. The Scandinavian four-piece are here to promote their latest LP, Mosquito. But both the band and album names are seemingly complete misnomers; they deliver the chilled indie pop/rock that is very difficult to hate and very difficult to swat away. Much like wasps and those mayflies that live for about a day, the merit of mosquitoes can be seriously questioned; the merit of Mosquito and Hater is clear. Hater’s set glints darkly with shoegaze; frontwoman Caroline Landahl’s voice sometimes reminiscent of Melody’s Echo Chamber, especially on the new album’s title track, and their jangly-fuzzy guitar sound creating a haze that hangs heavy and near-corporeal in the air and pushes the whole crowd into a unified sway. But within Hater exists the clarity of pop too, a bright heart. Even in this slightly close, slightly jigsawed night, and even from my view at the back of the venue, their performance resonates identically to their recorded music – polished, coolly reverberative, deeply felt and, ironically, loving.

The somewhat disjointed line-up of the night only goes to prove how hard it is to be a hater in the face of good live music, whatever genre.