AH, Twin Atlantic. The four-piece with a Glasgow Hydro date checked off the list, no strangers to the T in the Park line-up and the kings of manic, intimate club shows. The Glaswegian band have a habit of playing Edinburgh before the release of an album and it’s never usually in a sizeable venue – it’s in one of the very few sweaty venues in the capital.
You can see Twin Atlantic at a summer festival, you can see them supporting another band, but it will never be fully representative of their explosive live stature. If you catch them at a show with a smaller capacity then the energy is going to be incomparably palpable and frontman Sam McTrusty is going to have the crowd in the palm of his hands.
La Belle Angele once played host to gigs by Oasis and The Libertines but the rebuilt version of this venue seems more suited to Twin Atlantic’s live reputation. With their new album GLA out in September, playing these warm-up dates is a way to get excited for the upcoming tour – which features a three night stand at the Barrowlands.
With a series of summer festivals and other tiny dates already checked off, the band started with new song ‘Gold Elephant: Cherry Aligator’, featuring an incandescent guitar-less McTrusty whose face is screaming into the ecstatic crowd. It’s what follows that emphasises Twin Atlantic’s impeccable live craft, with several ecstatic blasts from the past that remain timeless from their previous two-and-a-half albums.
‘The Ghost of Eddie‘, ‘Edit Me’ and ‘Fall Into the Party’ impress early on and garner a rapturous response from the audience, complying with McTrusty’s demand for the crowd to sit down and cause chaos for the drop in the latter track.
The crowd weren’t wholly familiar with new track ‘Ex El’, which registered as perhaps the sole docile moment of the evening, but the band carried the crowd through the last five songs seamlessly, disregarding technical problems and the odd hiccup.
A return to these sort of venues is a treat for every Twin Atlantic fan, and Edinburgh must be relieved to get a band like the rockers of that calibre once every two years. In a venue like this with a capacity of 550, they are almost unbeatable.
