When Joanna Gruesome’s lead singer Alanna McArdle unexpectedly left the band earlier this year, it was hard to believe they would ever recover. With her large round eyes and intense stare, it always felt like McArdle was the center of the group, impossible to replace without the band loosing their identity. To compensate, the group has roped in, not one, but two singers to replace her: Kate Stonestreet from the Glaswegian punk band Pennycress and Roxy Brennan from Two White Cranes amongst numerous other DIY indie bands closely associated with JG.

 

With a total of six people in the band, that makes for a fairly cramped stage this evening, All dressed in black, the mood is anything but somber, in fact its positively jubilant. They seem at ease on stage, often breaking into fits of giggles between songs. If you had never seen the band before (as I hadn’t) and was unaware of the dramatic change the lineup had undergone only months before, you would be hard pressed to believe they hadn’t all been playing together for years.

 

Each Joanna Gruesome song essential repeats the same trick, but it’s a mighty good one. There’s the shouty punk verse with eardrum punishing distortion, which breaks into a clean guitar sound and a hushed, sweet melody for the chorus. The band then flips between these two extremes bewilderingly fast and as often as they can get away with. Whilst McArdle juggled both these sides of the band, her role has now been splint between the two: Stonestreet handles the angry stuff whilst Brennan does all the melodic bits, sharing harmonies with bashful guitarist Owen Williams. Stonestreet, with her shaved head, pogoes around the stage and looks like she should be fronting a band much more hardcore and severe than Gruesome’s noise-pop, but she smiles beamingly when the other two take over the singing and has a lightness of presence.

 

It’s hard to hear any of the lyrics, and songs and melodies wiz past so fast you can’t get a grip on them before they’re on to the next one. But I suppose if you want to sink your teeth into these songs, that’s what albums are for. JG’s live show is all about creating a buzzing atmosphere and they more than deliver on that front. The pace and energy is relentless, only the intro of ‘Hey! I Wanna be Ur Best Friend’ offers anything close to a moment of calm, but even that feels like an engine revving up to speed off for the song’s second half.

 

The set ends with the band being joined on stage by what I initially mistake as stage invaders. A trumpet and a saxophone player dressed in transparent raincoats. They blast out atonal noise as the band pummel their instruments into submission and Kate Stonestreet gives her best metal scream (you get the feeling she would’ve like to have done the whole show like this).

 

I usually greet claims that a gig was too loud with oblivious bewilderment, but I leave tonight’s show dazed and my eardrums ringing from what really was a blisteringly loud assault. Whether McArdle gets better and returns to the group or not, tonight shows they’re settling into they’re new shape just fine.

Louis Ormesher
Photos: Tom Barlow Brown