I was standing at the bar sipping a beer and watching the first support - a solo acoustic performance - wondering if the half-dozen people in the room would really constitute the whole audience for the night, when the venue suddenly filled out with middle-aged couples, many of whom had teenage daughters in tow. As A Genuine Freakshow had recently featured on the CD given away free with 'Word Magazine', I considered the possibility that this was a 'Word' reading contingent - after all, 'Word' readers do, by and large, tend to be a little more 'mature' than your NME kids. Giving this a great deal of thought proved difficult, though, because the old gits all insisted on talking extremely loudly over the poor guy on stage.
My questions are soon answered though: one of the teenage daughters fronts the next band on, and she's brought her parents and her mates, who've brought their parents...and so on. The place is packed and their slick but average performance receives a rapturous reception.
Thankfully, enough of them stick around for the main event, and are suitably rewarded. A Genuine Freakshow have, through months of hard touring, evolved in to a highly proficient and extremely solid, not to mention entertaining, live act. There are no real surprises in the set-list, which showcases a range of material from their debut long-player, 'Oftentimes' out later in the month. The real achievement here is the structure of the set, which is clearly designed with dynamic range and well-situated crescendos in mind. It flows perfectly as they dispatch layer upon layer of orchestrally-augmented post-rock that shifts effortlessly from the delicate and fragile to the speaker-shredding rock-out.
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A Genuine Freakshow are a band who are cool precisely because they're not cool: they don't care. In fact, they revel in their geekiness, their misfit status. This is the third time I have seen them perform now and on each occasion they've grown in confidence and robustness. If they keep this up, they won't be outsiders for much longer: the Freaks will be there with the cool kids - and deservedly so.
http://www.agenuinefreakshow.com/
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