Owls @ The Deaf Institute, Manchester, 17 Sep

Live Review by Will Fitzpatrick | 29 Sep 2014

“Sorry for the mind games!” Tim Kinsella blinks. In the customary fashion, Owls have just returned to the stage following the climax of their main set, and their irreverent frontman is keen to demythologise the process. Laughing scornfully at convention’s dictum that a band will play more songs ‘if you clap,’ Tim’s apology seems less about remorse than the perky deconstructivism that’s pervaded his work since his early years fronting Chicago punkas Cap’n Jazz. Owls’ songs – a curious diptych of abstract accessibility and foreboding complexity – have always pulled the rug out from under themselves, whether via the shape-shifting rumbles that just about comprise rhythmic patterns, or even Victor Villarreal’s preternatural guitar textures, and tonight we get to witness this breakdown in full effect.

There’s a tangible hope among the crowd that tonight’s itinerary will mainly involve highlights from the band’s self-titled 2001 debut, but playing to their own sense of cheery perversity, Owls largely mine this year’s spectacular comeback, Two. With six months for superfans to fully absorb the new LP, you might imagine there’d be more than mere gracious applause for the Lungfish lurch of Four Works of Art... Or the forcefully unsophisticated rocker A Drop of Blood... Predictably, however, it’s old favourites like What Whorse You Wrote Id On that draw the biggest whoops’n’hollers, as Tim spouts elliptically graceful poetry through his worn-ragged throat, and a room full of thirtysomething emo survivors mouth along ecstatically. Even when dipping their toes into pop’s warm waters, Owls are no one’s idea of a party band, and their cerebral tendencies will almost certainly see them consigned to the ‘cult heroes’ section forever. Still, give ‘em another decade or so, and the serrated majesty of these new songs should gain their rightful place alongside that debut as a treasure trove of confounding, off-kilter wonders – the inevitability of this drawn-out volte-face is perhaps the greatest mind game Owls have pulled off thus far.