Dressed in an oversized T-shirt with a disconcertingly large picture of Cher emblazoned across the front, Dilly Dally’s Katie Monks looks unassuming on stage. Yet, from her very first bloodcurdling, guttural scream, unleashed over jagged guitar, her voice resonates. It takes a second to place it before you realise it’s located at the midpoint between Frank Black and Kim Deal.
To say the Toronto band sound like the Pixies is like saying the sun is hot, but they do possess that same incendiary power. And on a cold January night in the close, sweaty confines of the Victoria, their blistering sound delivers the white heat the season demands.
Filthy and fierce, Monks’s slurred squalor can be magnetic. At other times tonight – their first proper UK show – she seems uncomfortable in the limelight, mumbling thanks and stopping half way through sentences. Only when she sings does she seem uncaged and free, screaming into the void, her eyes rolling back into her head. And the band – anchored by Benjamin “Benji” Reinhartz’s thunderous drumming – provide a swaggering backdrop, their sound throbbing with a rumbling, dirty and brutal urgency.
The Touch builds only to dissolve into Monks’s wailing as Liz Ball’s malevolent guitar overpowers her. Closing track Desire divebombs into a spiralling chorus.
Yet this isn’t just bleak aggression; there is also light and triumph in the peaks. In a cover of another famous Toronto export, Drake, Monks reinterprets Know Yourself’s “runnin’ through the 6” and “wailing woes” with cathartic release before they rip into their best song, Purple Rage, which ends with the band head down, pummelling the crowd with a riff. It’s equal to anything on Doolittle, and while this sound might not be new, it feels vital tonight.
- At Brudenell Social Club, Leeds, 22 January. Tickets: 0113 275 2411. Then touring until 29 January.
