Lorelle Meets The Obsolete – Wharf Chambers, Leeds 07/04/14

Stood inside a rather unprepossessing Victorian building – in a previous incarnation, one that had seen life as a pork pie factory – listening to the controlled, psyched-out sonic frenzy of a girl-boy duo from Mexico, you sense that Monday nights in Leeds may never again be quite the same. The location is the members only Wharf Chambers Co-operative Club; the name of the band is Lorelle Meets The Obsolete. Both are quickly establishing strong reputations for themselves – the former as a non-market driven space in which to enjoy a relaxed drink, art and experimental music, the latter as purveyors of progressive psychedelic stoner-rock.

Lorelle (singer and guitarist, Lorena Quintanilla) met the Obsolete (Alberto González on beats, bass, vocals and most everything else in the studio) in Guadalajara some ten years ago. Out of that union emerged first Soho Riots and then Holy Mountains before the couple mutated musically into Lorelle Meets The Obsolete. The albums On Welfare and Corruptible Faces followed – haunted exercises in what was their self-proclaimed pattern music – but it wasn’t until their appearances on consecutive nights last September at the Liverpool International Festival of Psychedelia and Leeds’ Mono Festival that people here in Britain really started to stand up and take note.

That attention has since been magnified through Chambers – their third album, though the first to be pushed this side of the Atlantic (through London’s Sonic Cathedral). Recorded in Chicago under the watchful eye of CAVE’s Cooper Crain and with Sonic Boom’s visionary hand at the mixing tiller, it has seen Lorelle Meets The Obsolete move into another auditory dimension altogether and this short UK tour (tonight is the first of six shows) highlighted as one of The Guardian’s Pick of the Week gigs.

Unleashed from the confines of the studio, and out on live action Lorelle Meets The Obsolete is a very different animal. Supplemented by Fernando Nuti on bass and David Lucchesi on drums – both from Italian psycho-cosmonauts New Candys – the two principals are allowed freedom to roam with their dual guitars, creating a narcotic template of repetition, distortion and delay over which Quintanilla’s almost indecipherable voice weaves a hypnotic, kaleidoscopic pattern.

Opening with the deleterious “Medicine To Cure Medicine Sickness”, a song which had featured on Sonic Cathedral’s Psyche For Sore Eyes compilation EP, Lorelle Meets The Obsolete embark on a mesmeric journey across the contours of their entire canon. The lolloping, spaced-out groove of “The In-Between” gives way to “The Myth Of The Wise” – the first of five songs taken from Chambers, all of which are invested with a taut muscularity perhaps not immediately apparent on their studio versions. New single “Sealed Scene” creeps out of the lysergic swirl with stealth, its B-side “Third Wave” following obedient suit. Yet it is not until a cataclysmic finale of “Taken” – the last song on their debut album – that the starship Lorelle Meets The Obsolete becomes totally unhitched from its cosmic moorings as the song’s complete white-out dénouement disappears in an avalanche of reverb and feedback. Catch them while you still can before they disappear in a psychedelic haze back over the Atlantic.

Setlist:

Medicine To Cure Medicine Sickness
The In-Between
The Myth Of The Wise
Sealed Scene
Third Wave
What’s Holding You?
Music For Dozens
Taken

• Review and photo by Simon Godley