Don’t get me wrong I love The Great Escape. It’s a Brighton institution and is one of the highlights of my year every time I go. But the crowd there sure can be a surly bunch sometimes. Especially in the early evening shows when there still hasn’t been enough time to consume a copious amount of alcohol. There was one band however that proved the exception to the rule this year and that was Wand, where the crowd response was just as chaotic as the bands barmy desert psych rock. I approached the show tonight anticipating something equally anarchic.

 

Support act Gang really are very good. A mess of flailing hair and meaty, stoner rock riff, there’s a lot of doom and gloom to their sound, but the spooky vibrato guitar and exaggerated falsetto-vocal parts gives it an element of theatricality or pantomime to it. In spirit, if not in sound, it’s a bit like the garage rock of the 60’s or 80’s. Much like those groups one eye is always firmly on the tune.

 

Restricted to a half hour festival set, Wand’s music was relentless and bludgeoning in its intensity. Given the freedom of a longer headline slot time they attempt to create something of a ‘journey’ that’s more dynamic in its tone, to varying results.

 

A huge amount of time is dedicated to incessant fiddling, droning on around the same handful of chords and messing with feedback whilst the drummer aimlessly thrashes at the cymbals. Occasionally it works and the band snaps back into playing with alarming precision and those huge guitars sound all the more powerful because of it. But sometimes it just sounds like a bunch of stoned teenagers amazed at every sound they can make when messing around with a new effects pedal they’ve just bought. Far too often the wait is too long and the pay off too small. One punter even feels its necessary to implore the band to ‘get on with it’ during a particularly self-indulgent moment.

 

By the time it comes to the encore many people seem to have already had their fill and leave, which is a shame because they miss a pretty excellent cover of the title track from my favorite David Bowie album Station To Station, twisting that central chugging riff into fitting their own sound. There’s plenty to enjoy tonight buried underneath all the navel-gazing, but this just means by the end the overwhelming feeling you’re left with is frustration at what could have been.

Louis Ormesher