These New Puritans have firmly established themselves in the sphere of British experimental acts who disregard their own ontology. Like industrial shit-kickers Factory Floor, who are also billed to test out the Belgrave’s young new stage (with a repeated support performance from East India Youth), frontman Jack Barnett has been tarnishing his band’s sound and rebuilding it with every album. Its newest incarnation, the part neo-classical, part pop-pounding Field of Reeds, is the most significant assertion yet, and live, it sounded like a fleeting, vital statement: what you were seeing was These New Puritans in the now. Beyond this moment, who knows what they’ll become?
For a band so interested in constantly flaunting genre – and more importantly, fucking with the very way in which they get defined – These New Puritans navigated this set like their music is the extension of one long thought. It might be Barnett’s stellar, sturdy bass notes that drive them, or the overwhelming uplift of their brass section, or just the interlocking presence of each member on the other, but this set felt strikingly well rooted, the band’s old material folding seamlessly into the new. The post-punk songs that dominated their embryonic years and the myriad of experimental genres that comprised Hidden may have been more exhilarating, and perhaps more suitable to Belgrave’s dingy, self-imposed greyscale; here, though, they felt lethargic, as studious and precise as the orchestral music that makes up Field of Reeds. It was a set that suggested more serenity than the dark room it was performed in, which ended up giving it a more hellish vibe; at points my eyes were focused, with some scepticism, on the equalizer behind the band’s pianist and synth-man, its levels running into the red, and fog floating around it as if we were descending.
Belgrave provided some curious imagery, then, but Barnett and his band appeared unmoved by it, comfortable in their own skin and completely at ease with the kind of experience they were giving us; think an upfront performance of Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden, with a new brooding protagonist in Barnett, who offers a reliable voice for melodramatic pop. If they were confident, though, the crowd was a mess; we watched tentatively, lost in swathes of horn exchanges, and rightly overpowered by the (perhaps deliberately) higher-levelled percussion unleashed by Barnett’s twin brother. Perhaps he was making up for lost time; the two songs the band opened with were beatless, driven by the coalescence of the band’s new neo-classical sound, before drums were introduced. With a command worthy of his music’s sense of ceremony, Barnett brought us into play: “You can move up, if you want”, he mumbled, as if it were a suggestion; really, it felt like we’d been summoned. And really, there was something uncomfortable about this experience being such an intimate one; it felt safer to hear “Fragment Two”, bristling with its anxiously oscillating piano notes, at a distance.
The gravitas of Field of Reeds seemed particular on stage, but it was being accented and refined, rather than relayed. Barnett’s band came across as both measured and icy, standing to attention for the most part, unless relieved It was the sign of a band with reverence for the music they were making, and the kind of genuine belief in its significance that disregarded what These New Puritans meant in the past, and what it might mean for the future: right now, this pretty but diligent sound is what matters.