22nd October<\/p>\n
Gorilla<\/p>\n
6\/10<\/p>\n
It\u2019s pretty smoky in Gorilla on a dark and rainy Tuesday evening. The final support act sips his cocktail of beer and orange juice, assuring us it\u2019s a \u201cpretty decent combination\u201d, and whacks on another house beat. The scattering of live vocals and trumpet keeps us sane for just long enough. Finally Washed Out clamber on to the stage, seemingly out of nowhere, and launch into Paracosm\u2019s first track \u201cIt All Feels Right\u201d – of which it does, for the first few minutes. It\u2019s tropical and ambient yet the crowd are statues. The cold, dead, terracotta\/paisley army of hipsters must be to blame as the set descends into a wall of sound for the next forty minutes. The shoegazey-rhythmic blowout is usually a good laugh, but it doesn\u2019t suit Washed Out. Forget the distortion and the blasting, they should be about the tranquil, the serene; and I just don\u2019t hear it.<\/p>\n
The drums murmur an underlying groove which is definitely enough to bite into, but the array of Korgs scattered around the stage too-easily drown out everything else. Greene, birther of the Washed Out brainchild, seems too acclimatised to the bedroom DJ sets and doesn\u2019t use the backing band effectively enough.<\/p>\n
There is potential though, as the set begins to become clearer and more focussed, as if the water in the ears has escaped or the smoke has lifted and pulled with it the spirit of the music. I, and maybe even the crowd, really enjoyed the last quarter of the gig and I felt that Washed Out deserve another chance, when it isn\u2019t cold or damp. They deserve the outdoors and the summer, or at least a better sound system. Maybe then the band\u2019s ambitious and vivid sound won\u2019t feel so washed out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Washed Out’s summery chillwave doesn’t cut it on a cold Tuesday night in Manchester<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1052,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[2773,121,26,6959],"coauthors":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10692"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1052"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10692\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10692"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=10692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}