At Portsmouth’s Edge Of The Wedge, Yorkshire garage post-punks Avalanche Party look and sound as though they have a broader vision than the small venue will allow, and tonight put on a performance as though there were thousands who couldn’t be there.
Avalanche Party @ The Edge of The Wedge, Portsmouth
Vocalist Ananda Howard of first support Brighton’s Winter Gardens delicately reminisces in the title track of upcoming mini-album Uncomfortable/Unlovable – “Struggle to speak, fear is born / I’m not an artist, an intellectual / nerves collide, nothing special”. There is nothing for them to worry about. Nobody is fooled by anyone in the band’s self-doubt for long, as guitarist Jamie Windless can be heard whooping and stomping from beneath deafening synth buzz and guitar feedback. They don’t make applying genres very easy, as gothic rock, post-punk and shoegaze are all prominent influences.
Even Ananda smirks, previously still and melancholic during extended instrumental intros, as she likely feels Jamie’s jumping through the floor. Their dark energy is fully revealed in the new percussion heavy, somewhat panic-inducing Search Party, and debut EP favourite Wonders Bleak.
Bringing more Brighton-based musical brilliance, Highdrive don’t make movement much simpler, covering the stage with more pedals than one would have thought any person would need. Delving into shoegaze-influenced rock more head-on, Highdrive sound huge from the get-go. They begin with a wall of whooshing feedback before opener Cherry, and vocalist Lucas Leitch defiantly holds his tambourine aloft. The groove of Swan is shattered into some ugly, but spectacular noise as Bella spends the end of the song sitting down twiddling the knobs of her effects. Still, amongst it all, the vocal harmonies of a screaming Something I Said sound stellar..
Most of their songs are connected by an evil-sounding bass hum and red light, helping to create the illusion of a cohesive set that isn’t a random list of songs – help that it doesn’t need, but creates a great ominous atmosphere. However, when it comes to putting on a show, tonight there comes a Yorkshire garage-punk band with even bigger ideas.
Avalanche Party arrive onstage to a solemn recording of The Everly Brothers’ ‘All I Have to Do is Dream’. Considering how the name of the band’s latest album Der Traub Über Alles translates from broken German to “the dream above all”, it appears that tonight’s show has a running theme and solid structure, and they do indeed play all but one track for the album.
The band opens with a snippet of recent single John Coltrane’s Moscow Skyscraper, which starts with alternating guitar notes, in a similar snarling spirit to Buzzcocks’ notoriously minimal guitar solo during Boredom. The integral difference is that rather than complain about the monotony, there is a building fury, ready to burst out, as frontman Jordan Bell repeatedly shouts during the chorus “I think I’m loosening up”. It is forty minutes before the song is played fully, making the first two-thirds of the show the most fierce warm-up enacted.
This snippet is repeated twice throughout the show. It goes to show how the performance may have been imagined – this is the moment when the pyrotechnics would go off, this video would play on the big screen, etc. However, a setlist arranged with intent of solid structure does not mean that everything sounds squeaky clean and tidy. Well, the “squeaky” might still apply to Jared Thorpe’s saxophone and heavily dirtied guitar, but it isn’t just this played at a ridiculous volume that commands for everybody’s attention.
There is a sermon-like aura that radiates from Jordan, who intensely stares over a much larger, imaginary crowd, laser-focused through the back wall. He points and gestures to everybody whenever he has an arm spare from his tape-covered, three-stringed guitar. It is as though he is imagining himself somewhere else, when his eyes briefly close, and at one point his voice gradually dwindles to a mumble, as though he is singing his own echo.
Despite this, it doesn’t feel obnoxious. No matter how laced they are with synths whooshes and bloops, they are firmly rooted in the chaotic messiness of their garage-punk roots, almost shaking the show’s structure to smithereens. The final three songs of the show are a fantastic representation of their variety. Shake The Slack is a much more forceful take on dance/post-punk revival megahit formula, tried and tested by Franz Ferdinand’s ‘Take Me Out’. The riff-heavy No Neutral pummels relentlessly, before a plummet in tempo for rock ballad Ecstasy – a spectacular sounding finale, squeezed into a much smaller room than it deserves.
The band leave after an intense hour to The Mamas & The Papas’ version of ‘Dream a Little Dream’. That’s enough dreaming for now. This was a performance that demands (and deserves) the recognition of many more, and they don’t sound as though they will stop until they make it a reality.
Live review of Avalanche Party @ Edge Of The Wedge, Portsmouth on 12th March 2025 by Nick Pollard. Photography by Rebecca Cairns.
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