Girl Friend

The Shipping Forecast, Liverpool
18th April 2015

Reviewed by Alicia Rose

With support from two Liverpool bands, ‘Lives’, who were interesting in their own dark and moody way, a fine looking band of five with a nice sound, albeit somewhat falling prey to the ‘tracks that all bleed into one’ syndrome, and ‘Tear Talk’, who without doubt were weakened by the fact they only had a very small fistful of watchers/listeners (as yet the numbers in the room were few for this gig) and seemingly gave little committal to their cause, hence their lacklustre and at times uninteresting performance.

Manchester based band ‘Girl Friend’ were indeed a visual and audio pleasure to behold. By now the room had filled out a bit, as the band entered stage left with enough pizzazz filled confidence to quite literally light up the occasion. It was like looking at a modern day romantic throwback to the late seventies and early eighties, with much sparkle of hope for something mysteriously new.

In this current industrial sea of bands awash with a fair bit of ‘driftwood’ and dead wood music, Girl Friend certainly look and sound strong enough to set sail and stay afloat with all possibility of crossing oceans and making waves on foreign lands.

They opened their set with a fitting and catchy tune, ‘You Lead The Way’, and immediately upped the tone of the night to its rightful place. The cellar type chamber housed in The Shipping Forecast venue bode well for an intimate gig, and the sound quality was well balanced and had clarity enough within the small heavily bricked space.

Lead singer Amory Neish-Melling continually exuded a sensual allure and moved effortlessly through every beat and rhythm of the songs, as did his younger sister/backing singer Eleanor and, as a band, with Jake Ward on (Keys / Guitar) and Sam Dabrowski (Drummer) hitting the skins they are genuinely quite optically enthusiastic and sound attention-grabbing.

This is very much an exciting group of musicians as technically astute as they are business minded, for it is apparent upon speaking with them that they live and breathe their music and are lucky enough to have a very strong team working with them on all levels.

Their set delivered nine tracks, all of which contained subtle strengths and attractiveness with current trending appeal focussed on the hip ‘Monte Carlo’ and the uber glittery ‘Chemical Reaction’ (both of which have been listened to more than 50,000 times collectively on their Soundcloud page) - and so their emergence endures as they hit the road running.

Their UK tour continues with several more dates, including Birmingham, Leicester, Brighton, Southampton, and culminating with the last date on the tour being at the Shacklewell Arms in London on April 27, to coincide with the release of their eagerly awaited EP ‘Arrive Alone, Leave Alone’.

You can trail their undeniably ‘gonna happen’ best newcomers into mainstream pop story via the website www.girlfriendband.com and/or tweet them @girlfriendMCR, and of course find them on the populous platform that is facebook, www.facebook.com/girlfriendmcr.

You can listen to a pre-recorded live interview here at www.spreaker.com/iamdogstar too.....

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