English Teacher, Queen Margaret Union, Glasgow review - Mercury winners step up in size with style

Props designed like flowers were scattered across the QMU stage for English Teacher's performance. A fitting choice given the Leeds group are evidently in full bloom these days, with an upgraded venue in Glasgow due to demand and, of course, a Mercury Music Prize collected along the way for debut album “This Could Be Texas”. 

Stepping up in size has not fazed them, though. The props were a nice backdrop but more eyecatching was singer Lily Fontaine, who fizzed with excitement all night and carried herself like she was born to be on a big stage. That isn't the most obvious setting for the band, given the varied and complex nature of some of their material, but in Fontaine they have someone who acts like the band are in their natural environment, no matter how unusual those time signatures are. 

Perhaps that's why the best material during the gig tended to be the punchiest. An opening "R & B" was terrifically wiry and 'Broken Biscuits' whipped up a tumult of noise to conclude, the vibrations loudly shuddering across the venue floor and into a crowd that was intently watching and, if not quite dancing, then at least moving with mild rhythm. Those early tracks made terrific use of drummer Douglas Frost, and it was no surprise the gig's tempo dropped when he shifted off the drumkit for a quieter run of songs around halfway through, even if the stripped back “You Blister My Paint” provided a superb showcase for Fontaine's voice. 

However that middle portion was mostly more variable, for while the band, here expanded to a five-piece with a keyboardist, are full of ideas, trying to place them all in every song proved hit and miss. 'Polyawkward' snapped from quiet/loud dynamics into a more expensive, sweeping finale with aplomb, but the plinky keys of their album’s title track dragged it down by making the song feel like it should be soundtracking a silent movie's chase scene from 1926. In contrast, 'Not Everybody Gets To Go To Space' had the opposite problem, being static live, and the shifts in tone stalled the overall momentum.

The majority of the set did connect, whether through pop eccentricity,  a wicked, evolving groove or sheer heart. Although the bulk of the set was lifted from their debut record, old track “A55” also shone, coming across like the soundtrack to a dream-pop prom dance before falling into hazy, blissful noise, and the brand new song “Billboards” cracked along with restless urgency. It set up a speedy finale that touched upon the tambourine shaking, hip swivelling “Nearly Daffodils” and the spy thriller guitar of “The World’s Biggest Paving Slab” before ”Albert Road” wrapped the main set with a beautiful, wandering daydream of a song. By that stage the appreciative shuffling had given way to fully fledged dancing, a trend that carried through the sharp shock encore of “Good Grief.”

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