Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Watching Buckle Tongue on stage as they deliver songs from their long awaited debut E.P., one of the many rampaging thoughts that takes pulls up an armchair, helps itself to a large glass of the most expensive whisky in the side cabinet and then chucks the half-drunk contents onto the roaring fire is that this how audiences must have felt when watching Iron Maiden perform their sets in the East End’s The Rainbow or how early fans felt their heart roar at the expansive noise laid out before them at The Whisky A Go-Go or The Concert Factory as Metallica took the stage.
The overwhelming feeling that this was a pivotal moment in time, the moment in which the hard work came together and that in years to come will have the critics of the future and the writers of such texts ascribe the debut headline gig at the Liverpool o2 Academy as the moment when Buckle Tongue came of age.
Some statements are conjecture, it could be seen as easy to proclaim such things, especially when the heavier side of rock doesn’t get the adulation in Liverpool as it perhaps should; but withstanding the end of the world, Buckle Tongue should and could be one of the groups that rescues the alarming dip in form of British Metal in the last decade. As Benny Chance, Shaun Ridge, Jack Somers and Jord Chance survey the wreckage of a once powerful genre, a genre which in recent years has been rightly dominated by the Nordic sphere of influence, the songs from A King In All Of Us reigned supreme.
The pulsating set, one honed and sharpened like a critic’s pencil working overtime at the National Theatre, was one in which the heart demanded excellence and the brain commanded attention. Neither organ was left disappointed, the insistence of Buckle Tongue’s music was one in which nobody in the audience was to be left disappointed.
With tracks such as Tidal, Embers, Grow, the plunging graft of Take It All and Love Parodies being played with domination and a clean crispness that came to exemplify Iron Maiden after the original lead vocalist left being performed, with the utter beauty of one of those rare moments in time in which to see a band member propose to his girlfriend live on stage was an absolute joy, it was easy to see why the band were not just emotional but that they deserved to relish that emotion.
The fly in the ointment, as there always must be in such circumstances, is that Liverpool and Wirral audiences may have to concede that these four young men really need to spread their wings, they need to knock on every door available, Europe, the lands of Scandinavia will have to be explored, the group’s musical empire needs to be expanded. Whilst it will be difficult to let this great band disappear off the local radar for a while, to flourish, to thrive and be the band that they are surely destined to be, Buckle Tongue need to fly the nest, they are just too good, to dynamic, to hold back.
Ian D. Hall