Bearded Magazine / Live Reviews / Honeyblood

Honeyblood @ O2 Academy, Oxford 05.11.14

For Honeyblood’s recent Halloween show in Glasgow on the NME New Breed Tour, singer/guitarist Stina Tweeddale and drummer Shona McVicar took to the stage dressed in full skeletal garb. Fast forward to a show taking place on Guy Fawkes night in Oxford, and a small part of our collective imaginations (or mine at least) was hoping for catherine wheels spinning perilously around the bass drum. Alas it was not to be, but perhaps this was for the best. Yes, because the building would inevitably have melted to the ground with headliners Superfood being forced to play their headline set atop a smouldering mass of rubble. But more importantly, Honeyblood came armed with one of the standout albums of the year and didn’t need to rely on any cheap tricks.

Nov 5th, 2014 at O2 Academy, Oxford / By Dave Reynolds
Honeyblood Surrounded on stage by both Superfood’s and their own gear, the show felt like it was taking place inside a rather large garage... with a well stocked bar, and some neighbours with fancy haircuts. It lent itself to a more informal setting than usual, so when the opening riffs of ‘Fall Forever’ erupted, it felt like how a show should be, a little more DIY. While Honeyblood retain a certain lo-fi aesthetic from early recordings in their bathroom, airing these tracks live brings to the fore those hookwormy melodies. ‘Biro’ and ‘(I’d Rather Be) Anywhere But Here’ swoon across with a certain languid groove, channelling 90’s fem-pop like The Breeders and Throwing Muses, while bridging across to melodic contemporaries like Best Coast and Wolf Alice.

There’s an attitude to enjoy with this band too. Yes, there’s some savagery in the lyrics which shine through on the record, but the live setting shows something else. After a guitar change provides a whole host of fuzzy feedback and a struggle to get rid of it, Stina nonchalantly jumps into ‘No Spare Key’ saying we’re going to play loud enough that it won’t matter anyway. Then with ‘All Dragged Up’, which already features the highest BPM of any track they have, the duo thunder through it at what feels like double speed to celebrate self-anointed Jive Wednesday. So much jiving in fact that drummer Shona loses a shoe, an understandable casualty following her ferocious attack on her kit during the track.

And all this takes place before ending with the excellent ‘Super Rat’ and ‘Killer Bangs’. Forget about remembering Guy Fawkes once a year, if we can have a yearly tribute to Shona losing a shoe on Jive Wednesday as a result of going a little too hard on ‘All Dragged Up’, I can get behind that.

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