The Delgados’ E’s: enhancing, enthralling, enlightening

The Delgados, they inform us after the opening salvo, are playing their debut London show and they start it with a brand new song. That should tell you enough about this band and its outlook; their new album ‘Hate’ has been out only a matter of weeks. The reception of the song was ecstatic which certainly encouraged co-singer/guitarist Emma Pollock to chatter at length between songs.

The musical language of this Glasgow lot is wide and adventurous, taking in folk, blues, indie, ballads, rock, prog, psychedelia… There is a four-strong string section onstage – and it is a delight to hear cello being re-tuned during a ‘rock’ gig! – and flutist, keyboardist alongside the usual instruments. All these helps create a music picture that is opulent, gracious and gallant in its search for the antidote to… the wholesale assassination of beauty.

The Delgados are a very intriguing outfit that has reversed roles for its duo of vocalists: Pollock’s vocalised songs are more aggressive, confrontational, neurotic, ambitiously arranged; Alun Woodwards delivers more reflective, pensive, elegiac and distant cuts. The Delgados’ oeuvre is like autumnal rhapsody, full of withering colours constantly faded by the elements but only in transition to the next beginning. These sonarium can inspire you to become a botanist...

The band’s fourth album contain a huge array of songs that can provide a feeling of hiking through a meadow (or a park, if you are an urbanite), or reflect splendour of the decaying world, or sketch the continental shifts… Tonic-sonic allows you to explore your inner vistas via tracks like ‘All You Need Is Hate’, an anti-dissing song that urges the actual opposite. The Delgados exercise serious, somewhat unnerving manner in spite of the world being stagnant and stuck up its own poppy arse.

This is dramatic music that gifts a fairly disconcerting experience. There are no easy thrills here, it demands your attention, patience and devotion but when a song is completed you fill enhanced, enthralled and enlightened. There is no wasting time in fastening an impression of grand artfulness as songs roll: ‘Accused Of Stealing’, ‘Coming In From The Cold’, ‘Peleton’, ‘The Light Before We Land’, ‘Clarinet’, ‘Flavours’…

There’s a sense that The Delgados are already regarded as real indie heroes because there is a pioneering spirit about what they do. I almost hop away from the Buck’s Palace…

(This show was a warm-up for a tour with Doves whose audience is in for a delicacy…)