Nothing - Leeds Brudenell, November 24th 2014

Despite never previously being enamoured with the Brudenell's games room as a live music venue, it took a night of shoegaze worship for the poor relation to the main room to finally come into its own. The compact, intimate space acted as the perfect backdrop for the post-grunge soundscapes served up by two leading lights in the current wave of bands whose musical lineage seems to stop dead at Nevermind.

First up was the sickeningly young Milk Teeth, who brought with them the intensity and verve of a headliner. Despite it being unlikely that anyone in the band was alive the year the punk broke, it doesn’t stop them wearing their influences heavily on their tattooed sleeves. Close your eyes and you could be in Seattle’s Crocodile bar in ’91. The ace in their pack is the drummer, whose wide-eyed intensity and overwrought emotion gives Milk Teeth an eminently watchable quality.

It speaks volumes for Nothing’s debut album Guilty of Everything that, even in the crowded market of shoegaze revivalists, it was able to cut through the noise and become one of 2014’s finest, regardless of genre. For many, though, this was the first time seeing the band and instead of blindly letting themselves get washed away by the dreamy alt-rock, they waited in hushed reverence to see if it could deliver on the rich promise of the record. It did.

Not even the decision to punctuate the set with wailing blasts of feedback and spoken-word film excerpts could take away from a set of fuzzy, distorted goodness that took us all far, far away from the reality of a miserable night in Leeds. 

Words - Guy Atkinson

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