The Otters @ Hitchin Club 85, Sun 12th June 2005
There are many reasons for a fan to watch the same band again and again. Perhaps the band is so prolific that they can play new songs at each gig, or have such a repertoire of old favourites that the set-list will always be different. Maybe the songs are so strange and interesting that it takes a while for you to get to know them: like making a new friend, you want to know what these tracks are talking about; also, you might want to dance with them, and don’t want to look too stupid when the music stops and leaves you flailing. Another reason might be a band’s habit of inviting special guests at each gig, so that things will always change on stage. This band, the Otters, do all of these things; but the main reason to see a band repeatedly is that they play great music, and needless to say, they do this too.
The Otters are four young men and one middle-aged radical. In this singer, Mark Astronaut (oddly enough, also the leader of Hertfordshire stalwarts the Astronauts), the band have a never-ending source of songs on which to work their magic. Familiar album tracks receive a fresh makeover: ‘Time to Roam’ benefits immensely from the sharp interplay between Dom and Craig, both able lead guitarists in their own right. Tonight, this track makes a rousing introduction, but leads in to a set of experimental depth. The band have moved far away from their rowdy beginnings, songs like ‘Thugs’ and ‘They Could Be Right’ as primitive as Warsaw were to the Joy Division of ‘Closer’. For the most part, the straightforward narrative has been abandoned, and new Otters tracks run together with intricate force.
The Otters are developing the kind of superlative sound for which new names are made, with old genres spliced together. I’d christen it “space-punk”. It’s a big sound, played with menace. ‘Is This What It’s All About?’ is a question answered with drama, grand and awkward riffs pounding out, like the Fall covering Led Zeppelin. ‘The Apologist’ is a pensive-aggressive epic, a false justification of the daily drudge by the titular character. But despite Mark’s dark stories and sometimes quite scary performance, there’s a lot of playfulness in the Otters mix - not least in the mischievous rhythm section of Joe and Lee – and the music’s extremity doesn’t stop us kids dancing.
This evening’s special guests are new sonic terrorists of WGC, Heldrake. They add percussion to ‘Melissa’s Party’ in the form of typewriter, exhaust pipe and makeshift body armour. One poor chap has been dressed up in a dustbin, two stolen road-signs and a welding mask, and the others hit him with anything they can find. Meanwhile, the Otters do their best to play on, though it’s somewhat hard for them when a number of dancers impossible to count frug their way around the stage at the end of the set.
The band have clearly amassed their own fanbase unafraid of hairy wailers. Perhaps this awkwardness of music and of line-up might yet lead, in the style of Mystery Jets, to some wider exposure. The songs certainly deserve to be heard: deceptively innocent ‘Being a Rabbit’, with its psychedelic fairground chorus and its stop-start riffs, is hard to resist stamping along to. ‘Motorbike Sluts from Hull’, meanwhile, has a pop at all those leathered ‘rebels’ and concludes terrifically, “why should I care?”
Care! Care! Care! There are some bands worth caring about.
