Brother - Gloucester Guildhall, Gloucester, England (05.15.11)
Posted by Daniel Wilcox on 05.19.2011
Up-and-coming Britpop rockers Brother triumph despite an unenthusiastic crowd.
Touring prior to the release of your debut album is always a tricky thing to do. The people coming to see you are obviously familiar with your work, but there's only a small amount of it available. There's going to be plenty of tracks that the audience aren't familiar with and sometimes they don't get into them straight away. And anyone who has shown up with little prior knowledge of your band may only be aware of what critics and other fans have said about you. The reason that this is a problem for Brother is because any critic who has taken the time to say or write something about this band has almost invariably made some vague comparison to Oasis. By just looking at the band, this comparison comes as no surprise, but musically there's acres between them. The only thing Brother and Oasis truly have in common is that they are quintessentially British, and as such fans at up-and-coming music venue the Gloucester Guildhall were treated to a quintessentially British live experience, complete with stage invasions, hecklers, audio problems and even a Queens Park Rangers flag draped shamelessly over some of the stage equipment.
That's a “soccer” team, by the way.
Even more British is the fact the crowd is made to wait. After three support acts, none of which I chose to hang around for due to the fact that a beer at the venue cost me almost twice the price it did in the bar next door, Brother finally took to the stage at just after 10pm to a lukewarm reception. The show wasn't sold out and the crowd wasn't particularly responsive – indeed I strolled in at about five minutes to ten and managed to walk right up to the barrier with relative ease. But the Gloucester is hardly a music hotbed and Brother aren't the most established band out there, so this isn't all that surprising.
I couldn't tell you the setlist, or even the names of some of the songs because they weren't introduced, but I can tell you the band played two songs before the crowd really became unglued. The first two tracks were unreleased tracks from the debut album, but the band's second single “Still Here” provoked an enormous response of spontaneous moshing, bouncing and screaming. Even up til this point the band were musically tight but with this mammoth anthem they were in the zone. If their self-confirmation is true that they'll be the main support to Pete Doherty and Reading festival this summer, songs like this will no doubt go down a treat. One overzealous fan, who had been stood directly next to me, made her way onstage and ended up dancing with the guitarist and then on her own before a couple of minutes before a member of the crew and her friend eventually pulled her down and she was removed by security, for now.
Following “Still Here” the band played more great Britpop tracks before eventually breaking into their biggest and best anthem to date, “Darling Buds of May.” Despite previous pleas from the band for more energy and enthusiasm from the audience, until this track Gloucester had been lukewarm at best. But the roar of this singalong would have had you thinking this band should be playing much bigger venues and academies than this. Our stage-invader had somehow eluded security again and rushed the stage during this track but tackled by security before she could get access to the band once more. This prompted the band to implore its audience to act more like her, and challenge the security because after all, there was only two of them. Despite the invitation for a mass stage invasion the crowd seemed to slip back into a mild coma despite the best efforts of the band, who through out riff after riff in conjunction with some big-ass choruses in an effort to get us moving. But aside from a few hand-clapping moments, there's not much an audience can do when they don't know the words.
With all that said, on the basis of this performance and the songs this band clearly has in its locker, Brother are a band to look out for. Their debut album is set to drop in early August and their new single “New Year's Day” was Zane Lowe's “biggest record in the world” last week. Furthermore the band has already appeared on Letterman and have an appearance booked on Jimmy Kimmel. Sub-headlining a stage at Reading Festival that has featured some fantastic up-and-coming bands over the years is a big deal and no doubt this time next year they'll be playing venues, and probably selling them out, twice as big as they were tonight.
Check out the video for “Darling Buds of May” below and look out for Brother's debut album Famous First Words on August 1st.
“Darling Buds of May” - Brother
The 411: It's difficult to judge the success of a show when a crowd is as unresponsive as they were for parts of this particular gig. But undeniably the band were technically exceptional and the songs that people had heard all provoked big responses from the Gloucester faithful. Brother are going to make it big in spite of the haters and naysayers; this was a joy to behold.
