Live Review: The Burning Hell, Steven Lambke + Jake Nicoll at The Victoria, London

If points were given for economy of personnel, Canadian garage folk outfit The Burning Hell’s European tour would be getting top marks. Tonight’s show is opened by Jake Nicoll, who alongside vocal harmonist Pamela MacKenzie is joined onstage by Ariel Sharratt, Mathias Kom and Steven Lambke. He’s followed by Steven Lambke, backed by Jake Nicoll, Mathias Kom and Ariel Sharratt. The night’s festivities are rounded off by headliners The Burning Hell, who are comprised of Mathias Kom, Ariel Sharratt, Steven Lambke and Jake Nicoll.

It’s a way of touring that I’ve not come across in twenty years of covering music, and as well as making absolute sense logistically and financially, it also lends tonight’s proceedings an added layer of intimacy and togetherness that wafts from the stage in great big communal waves across the gleeful crowd that have packed into the sold-out Victoria tonight. Far from resulting in a recycling of styles as one might fear, each of tonight’s three turns have their own distinct sounds which compliment rather than duplicate one another.

Jake Nicoll kicks things off with a clutch of gentle North American folk songs, stripped to the bare bones of acoustic guitar and voice, lifted by Pamela MacKenzie’s undulating harmonies. The room falls pin-drop silent as these delicate yarns are unwound, while Sharratt joins the duo to add saxophone solos that on paper sound completely out of place, but in practice compliment the songs perfectly. Kom, unusually on drums (Nicoll explains that they like to give everyone a turn behind the kit because “It’s the best instrument”), and Lambke join for a closing selection that echoes Elliott Smith’s knack for marrying pensive lyrics with uplifting tunes.

After a short break, which includes a dash to the merch table to pick up a Burning Hell ‘Birds of Garbage Island’ tea towel, the players return to the stage to provide the backing for Steven Lambke‘s set of skewed technicolour indie pop, which, with its woodwind section, playful psychedelia, off-kilter vocals and songs about volcanoes and the months of the year, brings about the unexpected revelation that much of my passion for music might actually stem from the hours I spent as a child watching Sesame Street. Audience interaction is encouraged and gleefully given, and when my gig companion for the night, fellow Joyzine editor Paul F Cook’s response of “Oxbow Lake” to Lambke’s request for our favourite geographical feature sows a degree of confusion onstage (it would appear that said bodies of water are less a staple of the Canadian curriculum than they are on these shores), they become a running joke in the between song back and forth.

Those waves of warmth that I mentioned earlier have swelled into great glittering tsunamis by the time The Burning Hell launch into their opening song, and as they ply us with tunes from their excellent recent album Garbage Island, the breakers grow to a magnitude beyond the scope of the Douglas Sea Scale. These shiny new nuggets of outsider pop are greeted with as much gusto as old favourites, and it’s not long before the spanish guitar of ‘Dirty Microphones’ and its tale of a DIY band touring a post-apocalyptic world sparks the first of many full-throated singalongs. It’s a genuine hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck moment, and our arrector pili muscles would continue to get a good workout as the night continued. Close your eyes and this could be one of those legendary Glastonbury Pyramid Stage moments that get an airing every year on 6Music. As we all belt out, “It’s just music, We used to play music,” in every voice you can feel the echoes of the still raw wounds of the gig-free years of lockdown and the joy of once again being able to stand together in a room full of strangers and feel like we’re all part of the same thing. Excuse me a moment, I appear to have something in my eye…

Our guided tour of Garbage Island showcases Kom’s uncanny knack to conjure both tears and laughter with a perfectly phrased lyric, introducing us to characters from Nigel The Gannett (who teaches ornithologists an important life lesson) to the tyrannical plastic-clad Bird Queen of Garbage Island, while Sharratt leaps from one instrument to another, steering the course on bass guitar, letting rip with an exhilarating freeform sax rock out on ‘Birdwatching’, hammering the kit for a stint on drums and coaxing magic from the clarinet. Much like the Bird Queen’s temple hewn from flotsam and jetson, the songs weld elements of indie, synthpop, Americana and more to their garage folk core but always retain the band’s perfect balance of heart and head.

The new songs are sprinkled with a generous helping of old favourites, including a glorious romp through military recruitment skewering ‘Friend Army’, Norse epic ‘Barbarians’ and ‘Men Without Hats’, which remains one of the most perfect encapsulations of what it is to be a music fan, wrapped up in a three and a half minute guitar pop tune, alongside a crowd-pleasing cover of They Might Be Giants’ classic ‘Birdhouse In Your Soul’. Then just when you thought the love bouncing back and forth from stage to crowd has reached its peak, we’re teased with opening notes of ‘Fuck The Government, I Love You’, which prompts a choir of 200 voices to belt out the chorus line with every ounce of frustration and joy that their souls have to offer. “Wow, that sounded personal!” responds Kom and they leave us briefly before returning for an encore of requests: simile-fest ‘It Happens In Florida’ provokes another tear-duct pricking singalong, with the audience providing the songs refrain of “Love” while Kom fills in the gaps with musings on the the beauty and chaos that emotion can bring, and the night is brought to a close with a crowd-pleasing romp through the hilarious lyrical shatter-shot of ‘Amateur Rapper’.

Tonight’s show is a perfect encapsulation of why we pack into dark backrooms of pubs for our live music fix instead of taking a seat in an arena of thousands. It’s these nights where the connection between band and audience is almost telepathic, where complete strangers will spark up conversation to share their love of this music (and for any non-Londoners out there, in these parts conversation of any kind with strangers in public places is a very rare thing indeed), where you feel a part of the glorious sounds emanating from the stage instead of a passive consumer, where you can see the sweat on the performers’ brows and the joy in their eyes. Nights that provide extra colour in our lives, where the smiles on our faces live on long past the train journey home. Nights that make you want to pick up a guitar, a microphone, a bass clarinet, a pair of drumsticks (after all, as we’ve been told, it is the best instrument), a pen, a brush, a pair of knitting needles or whatever gets your creative juices gushing. The Burning Hell are a band in love with music and a little bit of that love has lodged in the hearts of everyone present here, and no doubt in every audience they’ve reached on this tour. Make sure you get a piece when they’re next in your town.