O2 Academy, Leeds 22nd Feb 2025
Cloth have the joy of walking on stage at quarter past six on a Saturday night in Leeds. Fortunately, there are a reasonable number of people present already and, being Mogwai fans, they are receptive to giving a song time to develop. In a brief half hour, the Glasgow twins give us a whistle-stop tour, passing from their better known pieces to the forthcoming (April) album and back to their first released song.
A band with influential friends, Stuart Braithwaite from Mogwai invited them on tour and both he and Portishead feature on the forthcoming album. Tonight is just the twin guitars of Rachel and Paul Swinton plus drums. From this they conjure a hazy fusion of shoe-gaze, post-rock and a dreamy mist. Recent singles ‘Polaroid’ and ‘Golden’ stand out as catchy, shifting from the hazy glamour of the opening pieces. Rachel Swinton seems confident but focused on jittery, delicate sounds while Paul Swinton handles the chat and what little movement there is, as he hits his guitar groove with riff duties.
One song shows the mechanics of the sound, opening as a breathy ballad, seeing the drums kick in, then continuing as a breathy ballad on a louder backing. Interestingly, the last piece is the first they released, ‘Demo Love’, (from the new-talent-boosters, the Last Night In Glasgow label) and the punchiest, from the almost-‘Satisfaction’ riff to the side-beat to the big sound. From there, half a dozen years on, they have spun a gauzy haze reaching to ‘Golden’, the richly coloured and polished glimmer of sound, which reflects the duo’s intentions around mood, reflected in their forthcoming album’s title, ‘Pink Silence’: “This idea of pink silence describes the early morning or later in the evening, when you get this sort of strange ethereal light in the sky. It can mean one of two things; something which feels blissfully serene or something charged with a real sense of foreboding.”
This support slot will have reached quite a few new ears and inspired them to look out for the next album.