Live Review: Pulled Apart By Horses Kick Off UK Tour At Gorilla In Manchester 21 11 14
Melanie Council
Last year was the year that Dream Wife tore apart Great Escape, with surprise live sets popping up over Brighton, they were the band of the festival last year. So it was great to see them back, playing to a huge crowd at the Beach venue. With their debut album dropping early this year, and with it easily being in our top five albums of the year, it has taken them from being that cool underground band to that cool band everyone should take notice of. And their live performances show this too, they controlled that venue from start to finish, their stage presence alone shows they are going to be a musical force in the coming months when they do their headline UK tour this Autumn.
Comments: (I have better versions of the Rainbow material below.) This is a few cuts from the second night of the WW tour, the second show with Chester on drums (their first three nights of that tour were at the Rainbow Theatre). No more than this exist, because this is as much as the radio broadcast; except a version of "In that Quiet Earth/Afterglow," which was originally broadcast but for various reasons (best explained by David Dunnington) used to be hard to find (see following entries, however). To fill out the disc, some cuts from the Shrine Auditorium Lamb show have been appended to it. I have these exact same tracks on the bootleg Twilight Alehouse, a couple on an Empire Pool boot, one or two on compilation discs, this version, as well as a few of them on the Archive 1 box set, as this is the same show used on those first two discs. These sound better than the Twilight Alehouse versions. They have more depth and purity and they don't have the speed problems of Twilight. I also already have this "All in a Mouse's Night" on my second self-made compilation disc. It's probably one of the best live versions of the song out there, as they didn't play it much, and the quality of this whole disc is really quite good. There are one or two pops in both sections, possibly a few more in the Shrine Auditorium part, and some low hiss in both. But even with these (negligible) problems, the sound borders on Excellent, and I don't think even the band would have too much of a problem with the quality on here. As a last note, a small riff from "Moonlit Knight" is played in IKWIL right before the "Stagnation" theme kicks in, which seems to have happened fairly often on the '77 tour.
Live Review: Pulled Apart By Horses Kick Off UK Tour At Gorilla In Manchester 21 11 14
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Comments: At the Kiel Opera House (or Auditorium) in St. Louis, Missouri, this is a slightly better version than Water and Wrecking, above (see the BURP version, below, however). For one thing, this one has "Eleventh Earl of Mar" and most of the encore number, which the first version does not. For another, the sound is slightly better--louder, fuller, deeper. The mix is still odd--this is definitely a good one for those of you who are fans of the bass guitar. It's very high in the mix. The audience is so totally non-existent that 90% of the time the band might as well be playing live in a studio--that's how it sounds. The volume I believe sort of goes up and down in waves, though not so much that it's really noticeable. There is some hiss. I really like the sound on here, though, on this second listen; it's different than most live shows and you can really hear all the layers of the music. This is quite a valuable show from this tour. "Los Endos" is cut some few seconds before the "Squonk" theme kicks in, and "Box" is cut before Phil even gets to the second "She's a lady." "Eleventh Earl of Mar" starts just a few notes in, fading in at the beginning of the second disc. All of the song intros and all of the stuff between songs has been removed. On my original version of this show (which matched Simon's third version of this gig on his site), "Squonk" started more than a few seconds into the song and faded in. On listening to Water and Wrecking again, I discovered that its "Squonk" had the whole beginning, including even the count-in. I have therefore patched on the beginning of the song for this version, making what is probably the most complete version available.
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