Public Practice @ The Poetry Club 3/02/2019 (Live Review)

Pedalling with my thunder thighs I make a graceful exit on my bike out of Ibrox and into Partick, its your judgement at which place is better or worse.

Meeting my compadre, Conor Heafey, at the entrance we pick up our tickets, scour the room with our dry eyes and kill the ‘doors opening time’ with the puff off a cigarette.

Back inside the Poetry Club a SWG3 and Milvus Milvus open the night. They are an interesting duo who make a lot of beats out of their technology (that sentence makes me sound like a fucking old person). Steaphen MacGill straddles a bass and takes the role of lead vocalist while Nathan Parmer takes the duty of laying melody and chords on his guitar. No drummer, no problem. They sample, loop, layer everything on a series of Roland and Alesis Keyboards- that was what I was meaning by their “technology.” Their approach to playing live is one of tightly rigged practice. As MacGill plucks the beat, sings the verse Parmer is one step ahead, looping the chorus while the verse is already playing. It is a cool technique but I felt that they focused more on the confidence of their machinery rather than the skills of their own playing.

Milvus Milvus play regularly around Glasgow, the duo finish up and Heafey and I smoke a cigarette, talk about rock climbing, pick up two pints of Heineken at the bar and settle in for the next act.

I have tried to find this band online but couldn’t find any other information about them. They are not mentioned anywhere and they didn’t say their band name while performing. With that though, they weren’t too bad. A bit quiet and down key but many would call this ambience. The lead singer made a remark about the train attached to the wall but other than night not a lot else was said.

The ‘untitled’ band leave us still hungry, Heafey and I go for round 3 of a cigarette and his mum calls him. I zone out thinking about the week ahead. We then talk about family and laugh about a story I told him about Cyprus’s ammunition shed blowing up in the mid-summer heat.

Slipping back in and slipping a pint of Heineken into my cold hands we get cosy for the headliner which already has a full room, pretty impressive for a Sunday night but as they played it made sense why. Public Practice are touring from New York and have made their way around the major spots of the UK. Hitting up Leeds and Edinburgh before Glasgow it was a good feeling to see an East Coast American band stretching it legs on British soil.

Aesthetically they are a light punk band with influences that would stretch as far as indie-pop to a kind of alternative vibe. I promised myself that I wouldn’t say it but they remind me of The Ramones and Blondie, its not a bad thing but I hate myself that I cant think of another band to compare them to. I cant get foundation out of my head written by them and thats the kind of good shit I am looking for, a song that rams itself into my ear and worms into my cavities and plays on repeat. If I have my facts write then they are on their way to Brighton then to London. Then its back home to New York, sadly.

Check them out on Spotify, they have an EP and I think a video on YouTube too.