Charly Bliss @ The Hug & Pint, Glasgow, 17 Sep

Charly Bliss sell out The Hug & Pint tonight, and it seems they're absolutely killing it on their first ever European tour

Live Review by Skye Butchard | 19 Sep 2017

Partway through their lively basement set, Charly Bliss are wide-eyed and stunned. Vocalist and guitarist Eva Hendricks pants, clutching her hair in one hand, a scrunched-up piece of her dress with another. “You guys!” she screams into the still-cheering crowd as the cymbals ring out from Scare U. “If you told me that a crowd in Scotland would be singing the line 'All I eat is bread and cheese' back at me, I wouldn’t believe you.”

“IT’S ALL WE DO,” a gruff voice shouts back.

“Maybe we’re not too different after all,” drummer Sam Hendricks jokes from his cramped corner of the stage.

There’s a bubbling energy in the room. The chatter could be to relieve the tension more than anything else.

That adrenaline has been there since the band bobbed on to the stage, shocked at a sell-out, and gawping already. This is their first European tour and they’re killing it. The four-piece have been one of indie music’s brightest sparks this year. Their debut album, Guppy, was a word-of-mouth hit, with its sharp choruses and power-pop bluster. The band clearly share a love of early Weezer, but their identity comes from Eva Hendricks’ murky lyrics that clash well with the girlish and aggressive delivery.

Mostly, though, Guppy is a lot of fun. Watching live, it’s obvious that’s because they had fun making it. The group bounce through the set’s wildest moments and somehow the instrumentation stays clear and hefty throughout. The vocals and guitars bleed into each other in a red-hot blur of passion and Hendricks’ voice is bleating, sweet, and intense at once, and Spencer Fox’s sticky guitar lines do well to match her.

The band open with Percolator, a loose cannon anthem that showcases the best of their style. Hendricks’ melody somersaults octaves on the verse as she stands on her tiptoes at the edge of the stage, her face twisting into expressive new shapes. She uses every part of her body to describe a loose, ragged character with clarity and precision, adding an unhinged quality to the slapstick lyricism, one of the highlights being: 'Don’t you know I aim to please?! / I’m everybody’s favourite tease / put your hand on my knee / that’s what friends are for.'

The band rattle through Westermark and Ruby. The latter morphs into a swaying singalong where Hendricks doesn’t even need to stand near the mic to get lyrics shouted back at her. “There’s someone here who bought an EP from us back in 2014?” she asks afterwards. A hand flails in the crowd. Everyone else must have picked up that EP in the space since, because Urge to Purge erupts like a career-highlight would. The band's success could hardly be described as overnight given their grinding, but the size of this crowd produces cackling from them every time a song goes down well.  

Finishing on Love Me, a song from that same EP, it's a sweaty exorcism. Legs and hips spasm on the stage floor to the Pinkerton-echoing groove. This is the encore, and as they wrap up, they’re beckoned to play again. They look like they might try, but the mics have been cut. Hendricks taps on it, then decides to shout instead: "Will you guys join me in a shot?" We all woop. "I’m going to remember this night for a very long time," she says, cheers-ing a hundred people.

http://www.charlybliss.com/