The list of upcoming gigs on Anna Meredith’s website is boggling in its range: band shows alternate with concert performances of a recorder concerto, a symphony for body parts, music for jazz orchestra and a reinterpretation of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Varmints, her debut album, is where she turns her work as a contemporary composer up to 11: she’s said in an interview that her iPod is “90% Queen” and it certainly shows.
This “international launch party” begins, like the album, with Nautilus: a pulverising instrumental track that swells through a series of rhythmic detonations designed, at a guess, to demolish buildings. Its opening moments establish what becomes a common theme of the show, when the chords juddering beneath Tom Kelly’s bombastic tuba turn out not to be played on a keyboard, but a cello wired for distortion. Meredith and her band excel at this: merging industrial noise with something more organic, surprising you into hearing classical instruments anew. R-Type writhes with electronic squiggles, all of which are visibly produced by elastic fingers bounding over strings and clarinet, each musician vying to out-metal the others’ extravagant riffs.
Track after track builds through hypotrochoid spirals to a relentless, ecstatic crescendo, but the other surprise is Meredith’s knack for catchy pop. Taken is the most immediate: a sunburst song that makes you wonder why so many identikit indie bands use bass when they could have rumbling tuba instead. And Dowager is the most tender, sung by drummer Sam Wilson in a luminous falsetto as delicate as his limbs are forceful and demanding elsewhere. They end with Never Wonder, Meredith and Wilson swapping pings and clanks on toys and bells before eerily intoning a snatch of Jennifer Rush’s Power of Love. It’s silly, striking and smart – Meredith in a nutshell.
