Miya Folick @ Broadcast, Glasgow, 24 May
Los Angeles based alt rock singer-songwriter Miya Folick hasn’t had the easiest transatlantic trip. Tonight we’re told that, for unknown reasons, support Hairband have pulled out so the gig is running about an hour later than anticipated. Line-up shifts will no doubt be familiar to the singer at this point in her career. But last night’s gig was in Manchester; the same night that the horrific bomb attack took place. It’s eerily quiet in downstairs Broadcast and though there’s our equivalent of Jack Frost outside – the well-known grey mist, aka fog – it seems more likely that the terror events have sadly displaced many of the city’s music lovers for one night.
Absolutely none of this chips at the band's enduring professionalism (who have toured with Chairlift in the US) as they come out to support first act Joshua Gray. Gray creates some pleasant shoegaze soundscapes for us, using that notorious bedroom composer line-up: one man and his mac (pedal-laden guitar and drum-machine). The support, to its credit, is soothing in a somnambulant way, but by that same virtue, goes against the purpose of a support itself. Folick and her band have a lot of work to do to engage the room.
Carefully composed right down to the agile cymbal stops at the end of songs, it’s hard to pin down Follick’s influences into one corner. At times they’re exemplary, swelling garage rock as on single Trouble Adjusting. They further display a cool intimacy with the genre with the dexterous, biting bassline on I Got Drunk. On slower, soul-baring song Talking With Strangers however, Folick comes across as world-weary and stoic, reminiscent of folk icon Sibylle Baier. Her voice easily traverses gravelly pleading to incandescent howling, and only fools would underestimate its strength. Pet Body is a cacophonous track of racy, adrenaline-filled guitar and shouts.
Folick also has her guitar playing and dancing perfectly synchronised, her movements never missing a beat. Our favourite track comes towards the end of the night when, with a stripped-back band, she unites her discussion of brains and bodies in an environment-aware narrative, entreating we ‘have to get back to the garden’. Its biblical scale fits with her huge talent, one which we expect will be housed in a larger (and fuller) venue next time she hits Scotland.