Sombre indie rock has pretty much been done to death, you might say. It’s hard to identify new places for the sound to go. Some years ago, Sigur Rós took it skywards, generating crescendos until the trick wore thin. Editors took wafty gloom to the mass market. The xx, by contrast, went radically minimal, deep into R&B.
London trio Daughter – who have just finished off a UK tour with a triumphal sold-out gig at London’s nearly 5,000-capacity Brixton Academy – are two, rather good, UK top 20 albums into a career of running guitars through effects pedals to hit that big, sad, echo-y, sweet spot.
Tonight’s first song, New Ways – which opens their second album, Not to Disappear – burbles in on a wave of atmospherics and monochrome lighting. For this celebratory gig, the trio – completed by drummer Remi Aguilella – have brought along their usual touring multi-instrumentalist Cathy Lucas, with Catherine Ring on percussion, and a brass trio.
The guitar line here (and elsewhere) owes more than a little to the xx; a minority of critics have hit out at the band’s perhaps overpolite sound. Soon, though, singing guitarist Elena Tonra is contrasting her “washed out brain” with her “dirty mind”, and her need for something a lover is offering. Her disdain is compelling.
Entire cities of little black boxes are laid at the feet of Tonra and fellow guitarist Igor Haefeli. He stamps on one of them, and everything gains in scope. It is fair to say that Daughter are not reinventing the wheel here, musically – sometimes Haefeli bows his guitar; even Tonra’s cool, cooed vocals are effects-laden – but as tonight’s gig attests, the wheel can stay as is: this trio are exceptionally good at pushing a design classic along.
Theirs is a crowd that listens, rapt, for 90 minutes – probably because the quality of the writing here is so high. You could just quote reams of Tonra’s lyrics, which, by contrast, do actually find gripping new ways of talking about love and its discontents (first album) and other ties that bind (second album; not for nothing is this band called Daughter).
For all their way with granular-level emotion, Daughter first made their name with a state-of-the-generation song called Youth, in which Tonra sings prettily: “And if you’re still breathing, you’re the lucky ones/ ’Cause most of us are heaving through corrupted lungs.” Someone thought this would be a good tune to advertise ITV’s coverage of the 2012 Tour de France, among other synchs. Judging from the huge singalong three-quarters of the way through the set, this is still Daughter’s defining anthem. But they have even better songs.
No Care, for example. It’s one of the few songs in which, musically, Daughter dare to shrug off their spacious prettiness and actually threaten. Tonra is excellent on the minutiae of relationships – about “fighting over the way something was said” – and No Care describes a ghastly, drunken post-coital scene with bitterness; live, it spices up a regal set that can start to sound a little samey. Learning that Tonra and Haefeli are a real-life couple prompts more questions than it answers, of course.
Even better is Doing the Right Thing, a majestic pop song about Alzheimer’s. The point of view is a kind of first-person omniscience – a very clever tactic, given the subject matter – in which the sufferer examines their own decline. She cries out for her own mother. Should her daughter tell her that she died long ago, and can’t help her now?
This is ninja-level emotional subtlety, delivered tonight in a markedly altered form from the album version. Tonra tinkers with the melody, the arrangements following suit.
Unimaginative indie bands get in string sections. Daughter’s choice of a brass trio shows more class. But for all their nous, Daughter actually miss several opportunities to send the audience home devastated by the nuclear winter that can be wrung from a stately trombone-trumpet one-two. Maybe it’s the notoriously soupy Brixton acoustics, but the trio merely add depth throughout.
It’s a minor quibble; this is a set of great heft from a fine band on a satisfying narrative arc. Not to Disappear, released in January, would have charted higher than 17, their label avers, were it not for the death of David Bowie. “Albums sold” is an incomplete metric anyway; “tickets sold” is a better measure of net worth, and Daughter are exporting nicely: they have – once again – sold out at New York’s 3,000-capacity Terminal 5 this week.
