Taking a break from their tour with collaborative album partners King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Mild High Club took on a sold out Leed’s Brudenell Social Club with their own recipe of psychedelic space sounds.
Mild High Club
The internet search-elusive BIG (not surprising considering their name), a band of Leeds locals, began the night by offering us a few dreamy slacker rock tunes. “Please Don’t Go Away” is entrancing, with grooving guitar and enthusiastic drums.
Aldous RH is Alexander Aldous Robinson Hewitt, who played his songs with a band of four others who – you couldn’t tell if he didn’t say so – had never practiced together before. Hewitt was nervous, he admitted, but it didn’t show. They played beautifully in a jazz-tinged set full of slow liquid guitar builds, velvet piano and svelte vocals that floated through the crowd – Prince and Pink Floyd in an impressive combination. “Sensuality” is a sleek little number with gooey funk synth. During their last song, everyone, band and crowd included, was invited to crouch to the ground and sing along, “We all need a bed, son,” echoed through the room.
One thing we seem to get in England that doesn’t happen in the US is a crowd chanting along to an instrumental solo. Mild High Club frontman Alex Brettin had a little chuckle to himself as they sang along to a guitar solo, the room having already heated to boiling and a sea of heads filling every inch of Brudenell’s Community Room. A string of fairy lights made their way across the crowd, the most appropriate crowd surfing fit for the band’s heavenly sunburst of a song in “Homage.”
A switch of instruments and a shift to classical piano sounds brings jam outros abound, transforming the room into a worthy jazz salon. As celebratory smoke rises from various points in the crowd – “I’d be happy to smoke that with you later” – they close on the ever-loved “Windowpane” with the sounds of (Mild High Club-staple) glittery surreal harpsichords.