Gig Review: Legss At 100 Club
A rollercoaster of sound, timing, and creative odes to drunken anger.
The night was set to be big; no less than three support acts to welcome the crowd as they shook off the cold and meandered into the deep underbelly of this classic venue. As part of the ‘Live at the 100 Club’ series, South London post-punk four-piece Legss were headlining a night of grunge extravaganza. Other notable names performing for this series include Ugly and The Bug Club. Though I didn’t quite catch the first two support acts of the night – Robbie & Mona and Lichen -- the crowd seemed pleasantly loosened into conversations spilling over pints in plastic cups. Though ambitious and collaborative, this meaty line-up posed a problem for the night, as quickly the bands lagged behind their predetermined set times. Confused, half the audience left between acts for a quick rollie, uncertain if they were missing the end or beginning of a performance.
Coming as welcome punctuation to this discontinuity was Bingo Fury, an up-and-coming Bristol-based artist newly signed to Legss’ label, The State 51 Conspiracy. Jazz experimentation, hazy no wave lashings, melodic lines ricocheting between full-bellied instruments played by Fury’s trusty band… the set had it all. Think James Chance and Silver Jews tangled in curious, mono-syllabic vocals made for Radio 6. The stomach of the crowd loved it, and yet on the fringes of the room conversation raced onwards. I can’t put this down to anything other than the garbled sound-system that turned the clarity of the recorded tracks into a murky pool of confused fuzz.
Despite this, Bingo Fury is an artist to watch, if not for the live performance then for the unique shaping of classical no wave, the surprising moments of sentimentality and sadness hugging the set like a shrug on lonely shoulders. More specifically, ‘Leather Sky’ is a beautiful lamentation and deserves to be added to your winter playlists immediately.
Onto the main event. When they did come on, Legss shuffled to the stage hurriedly, testing instruments in a frenzied anti-climax in response to their timing issues. Perched next to a piano with the Burnley Football Club scarf draped delicately atop the lid, Legss kicked off with their glorious new track Fester. To the right of the stage, Louis Grace kept the performance steady with a technically tight percussion section, managing also to inject the same disillusioned anger into the set that Ned Green’s angry spitting and Jake Martin’s growling bass represented. Their bodies rocked back and forth, Max Oliver on guitar stealing the show at points by playing his like a whip, held like a newborn he was not particularly fond of. This twisting and thrashing wasn’t necessarily coherent, but if the set was to be seen as a purge, it worked well as unruly and aggressive.
It’s no secret that Ned Green is an incredible poet. His lyricism is brooding and melancholic, conjuring feverish characters alienated by the choking fist of London, painting disturbed and disgruntled psyches in tug-of-war with the evils of a post-truth age – landlords and the housing crisis, digitised communication, climate change. These lyrics also speak within a larger literary, musical and visual canon. Though this kind of post-(post?)-punk (or ‘crank wave’, according to Spotify) is usually rooted in a freshly birthed now-ness, Legss have a clear room in the palace of the musical canon. For example, ‘The Landlord’ was a clear stand-out in the performance. The elongated outro in which Ned yells ‘I’m just taking a break man!’ had the audience thrashing in ecstasy. They played one of the new tracks from the EP, ‘Daddy there’s sand in the sandwiches’ (SARNIES, their set list said simply, to the delight of my northern heritage) expertly, though it missed some of the extra backing vocals or garnishes the recorded version contains. A new track followed, darker and deeper than the last. However, by pitching themselves into the future, Legss left behind some of their best stuff – no ‘Writhing Comedy’, usually their closing song, no ‘On Killing a Swan Blues’, jumpy and riotous enough to break up the set a little better.
Because of this, I left with a hunger that hadn’t quite been satisfied. On the way out, one last-ditch conversation to fill this hole: I spoke to a couple who had travelled all the way from Brighton to catch the gig, who gushed uninhibitedly about the performance. For them, the track ‘The Landlord’ is a synecdoche for their entire musical endeavour, as it feels ‘exactly like a rant; you think it’s thick incoherence but eventually comes an a-ha moment - where everything pulls together into brittle clarity’. Their set, then, was a creative ode to drunken anger. The world spins, same as always, but there’s a heat in your bones alienating language and body from the deadening dumbshow of sociopolitical sobriety. Legss may have played to a smaller crowd than anticipated and didn’t quite overcome their sound issues, but this couple had handed me an almost perfect review. And I believed it. Legss don’t just make music, they make art.