It’s Buffee’s first time in Glasgow and she’s learnt the hard way not to trust the online reviews of Shawarma King. But she’s in otherwise fine spirits, delivering a sleek set of electronic dream-pop with a glitchy edge. Despite a quick intervention to right some rogue cables, it’s a great set, lit up by a Britney cover late on (‘Everytime’) that sounds like the classic tune has been remixed to sound like underwater dubstep.
Mandy, Indiana launch straight into their industrial attack with punishing cuts from their excellent new album, URGH. ‘A Brighter Tomorrow’ feels decidedly tongue-in-cheek when the serrated guitar and snappy drums get into an apocalyptic rhythm and ‘Dodecahedron’ finds funk at the precipice of noise. Almost all lyrics are in French, but regardless of your linguistic knowledge the vocal mix is so muddy you’d be hard-pressed to hear what was going on.
What comes through crystal clear is singer Valetine Caulfield’s withering diatribe on despicable men and the normalisation of sexual assault by inaction. This comes ahead of the snarling ‘I’ll Ask Her’ and there’s a palpable awkwardness when she asks the women “How many of you have been or know someone who’s been sexually assaulted?” and almost all respond in the affirmative. She then asks the men “how many of you know a sexually assaulter?” and there’s maybe two responses. It underlines passive culpability and the disconnect between experience and inaction. The song’s challenge to do better must be recognised.
This comes just a few songs in and then Caulfield spends much of the rest of the show in the audience, further hampering the intelligibility of the vocals but making for a hell of a good time as the crowd mosh, dance and scream to crackers like ‘ist halt so’, ‘Iron Maiden’ and the show-stealing percussive extravaganza ‘Cursive’.
Mandy, Indiana bring emotion and politics together with a revolutionary zeal that can’t help but be effective. The message is felt and understood rather than simply heard. Despite the industrial scale of their sizzling noise, it’s always dance-able and it’s well-appreciated by the audience that rage is the correct response to today’s world. Mandy, Indiana are genuine fire-starters in a scene that sometimes feels performative or detached from reality. Not a doleful scream into the void, but a direct call to action. Don’t wait to be inspired.
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