REVIEW: Hotel Lux at Sidney&Matilda
Sheffield’s Sidney&Matilda seems a fitting venue for Hotel Lux in this juncture of their career, with its industrial past and artsy present mirroring the Plymouth group’s progression from Windmill-adjacent post-punks to purveyors of socially conscious indie-pop. This push and pull between the past, present and future also acts as the running theme over the course of the evening as a whole; with each act on the three-band bill offering some reinterpretation or reinvention of a sound that came before them.
Up first are Leeds’ Substandards, blending The Strokes’ directness with Madchester and indie-pop inflections to create festival-season-ready anthems much needed in Yorkshire’s currently freezing late-autumn. This is a group clearly having fun on stage and that energy really passes on to the audience; each big chorus and riff feels destined for a huge tent in a field come next summer.
Then, the second support of the night comes from Sheffield’s own Any Old Iron, who surely break new grounds with decibel levels at the venue. Billing themselves as “the sound of a man being eaten alive by hyaenas”, the four-piece certainly live up to their reputation and deliver a set of almost-comical levels of noise. At one pivotal moment, their bassist drops his pick and proceeds to continue playing with a can of San Miguel, all whilst downing a Guinness, a feat I’ve never seen achieved before and I’m unsure if I’ll ever see achieved again.
Hotel Lux take the stage inconspicuously, working through the tangle of instruments and cables that comes with the territory of musical ambition they currently find themselves in; harmonica holders, DIY reversible keyboard stands and an electro-mandolin are tested and repositioned like a game of musical buckaroo as the band ready themselves. From the first to last note of the set that follows, frontman Lewis Duffin delivers his lyrics like a man possessed, his distinctive voice sliding from a croon in ‘Nod to the Retrospect’ to a church-pulpit rant in ‘Costermonger’ at a moment’s notice, on occasion reciting from a lyric book to really complete the image. Behind him too, the rest of Hotel Lux attack the music tonight with a real sense of warmth and familiarity, these songs, despite some of them not even being released at the time of the gig, arrive with a real lived-in feel, like old covers the band just happen to know. It’s the perfect approach to the music of their stellar new album The Bitter Cup with it’s Beautiful South-esque slices of kitchen sink drama and political observation, with the air of spontaneity here really positioning the music in the world of something like a modern folk song.
With a setlist comprised mostly of songs from The Bitter Cup, with a few earlier tracks like the infectious ‘Ballad of You & I’ (the only song tonight to boast a music video featuring a cast member from Love Actually), the tone tonight veers towards the intense. This change in both mood and sonic world for Hotel Lux is a really interesting one and helps them carve their own identity in the wake of the post-punk scene they emerged from. Read any press around the group the same few terms and names do tend to crop up, ones like Fontaines D.C., Shame, The Windmill, Black Country, New Road and, most frequently, post-punk. Whilst the term “post punk” has somewhat found itself meaningless over the course of the last few years, if have a sound in mind when you hear those words, the chances are that it’s the sound Hotel Lux sported on one of their earlier tracks like ‘The Last Hangman’. This iteration of the band was undoubtedly brilliant and their debut album Hands Across the Creek found fans in both the public and the press but the evolution on show from that album to The Bitter Cup is truly on display here tonight.
There’s a moment at the end of ‘Another One Gone’ tonight where Duffin, having ceded vocal duties momentarily to the group’s two guitarists, stands in a foot or so back from the stage’s edge, staring down at the ground as the song swirls around him. It’s a brilliant image on its own but it’s also effective as a reflection of the song’s themes, maybe this move was spontaneous, just as the lyrics books earlier really did seem to be out of necessity, but to an audience it all adds up to a compelling performance, the intensity and sincerity of these songs funnelled through the band as performers not just musicians. If the focus of The Bitter Cup is about the past and communities fading, then tonight Hotel Lux used that music to bring their community to us; an open-armed embrace that just so happens to be delivered through mile-a-minute lyricism and razor-sharp guitars.
Words: Sam Wilkinson
