Live review: Brenda & Munroe Effect – Basement Jaks, 6th July 2008

After a lengthy period of small venues closing down or going sour, Portsmouth’s small-time local promoters are on the look-out for new and unusual places to put on the sort of bands that are too small for the bigger halls but too good to miss. Which is why we’re lounging on sofas in the laughably named Basement Jaks (see what they did there?), a little lounge-bar function room underneath a large pub by Southsea Common.

The sofas empty pretty swiftly when local post-hardcore architects Munroe Effect take up their instruments and launch into a frantic and intense set of polyrhythms and stop-start noise. Every local scene has a number of good bands, but there are usually no more than a handful that everyone agrees have the potential to go on to bigger things; Munroe Effect are one of them.

A sure sign is that they seem to be better every time you see them play. Despite having recently slimmed down to one guitarist from two, Munroe Effect fill the spectrum with punchy basslines and slashing washes of effected guitar while vocalist Dan Sutton punctuates his psychodrama lyrics with the occasional exorcism shriek. There’s not a lot of room to work with, and the view is obscured by the prevalent pillars that hold the little venue together, but the sound is spectacular and the band thrash around in their corral as if it were three times as big.

Munroe Effect‘s performance is as energetic and powerful as their sound, and Sutton manages to break two mic-stands during the course of the set, the second time stopping to ask the sound-man (in an abashed and apologetic tone) “you are insured, right?” There’s something special about squeezing a powerful show into a little basement venue like this, and Munroe Effect make the best of it – suitably enough for a band with a song titled “Subterranean Death Clash”.

Then it’s back to the sofas and bottled lager while Bournemouth’s Brenda assemble their amps and vocalist Joe’s impressive rig of computers and switches. Anyone who’s ever seen Brenda before will tell you they should be huge and that you should go out of your way to see them play live; that’s about half the audience here tonight, with the other half consisting of people who took the word of the first half and came along to check them out.

And it’s no exaggeration to say that no one is disappointed. On sheer song-writing talent alone, Brenda are a startling proposition, but combined with their ability to conjure up waves of shimmering noise and beds of crunching guitar they’re a completely arresting experience on stage… even when, as tonight, there isn’t a stage to speak of.

Drawing on multiple influences from post-rock, post-metal and progressive forms, Brenda‘s music is cinematic in scope, and much heavier heard live than on record. It’s no disservice to the rest of the band to say that the thing that grabs a new listener first is Joe’s voice, which has incredible range and subtlety as well as a style quite uncommon to rock music in general. I try to avoid comparative amalgams as much as possible, but trying to explain Brenda‘s sound without them would take page after page of fruitless words. So when I say they sound like what you might get if Jeff Buckley came back from the dead to front for Oceansize, you’ll just have to accept that’s a loose approximation of convenience that does nothing to explain the rich complexity of their work.

The added bonus is Brenda‘s self-effacing charm, evident not just in their no-holds-barred enthusiasm for playing such a tiny venue to such a small crowd, but in Joe’s inter-song asides; one tune comes with a retrospective “jazz disclaimer”, and later in the set there’s a totally unmerited “R Kelly disclaimer” for a moody paranoia-ballad that I suspect may have been titled “Possession”. Joe may pull out all the stops with his voice, but there’s none of R Kelly’s sleazy pretence and egotism involved; instead, we get something that Tricky might have made had he fallen in with rock musicians instead of hip-hoppers.

After an epic encore, Brenda and their soundman start packing away their kit as best they can in between thanks and plaudits from converts old and new alike. Gigs like this make you remember why you got into seeing music played live in the first place – the intimacy, the intensity, the sense of wonder – and you couldn’t pick a better band to cap the bill. If you get the chance to see Brenda play live, be sure you do so; if afterwards you can honestly tell me you were disappointed, I’ll PayPal you the cost of your ticket.