Words by Ed King
On Thursday 1 February, Black Country fourpiece Chartreuse headline the Hare and Hounds in Kings Heath – with support from Wildforms.
Doors open at 7:30pm with tickets price at £10 plus booking fee, as promoted by This Is Tmrw. Minimum entry is 14 years old, with anyone lucky enough to be under 18 needing (a legally) adult supervision.
For more direct information and links to online ticket sales, click here.
Coming to the Hare and Hounds for their first gig of 2024 and as part of the Kings Heath music hub’s line up for Independent Venue Week – the nationwide celebration of… the clue is in the title – Chartreuse are still riding the wave of their debut album, Morning Ritual.
Released in November 2023, Chartreuse celebrated their long-awaited debut LP (released just in time for Christmas and just shy of a decade after they formed in 2014) with a series of in-store gigs and on celebrated stages – including Rough Trade in Bristol and London Town’s noisemaking 600 capacity newcomer, Lafayette.
12 tracks of blistering dark electronica, Morning Ritual is the shoegazing broken beat Chartreuse celebrants will know and love – but with some surprisingly jazz infused twists and turns, and a clarity in production that carries the torch Mike Wagstaff stared burning on their 2021 Is It Autumn Already? EP.
Tracks like ‘Sheild From Bedlam’, ‘This Could Be Anything’, and the arguably the album’s opener ‘All Seeing All The Time’, deliver the band’s familiar ether nestling laments with Michael Wagstaff’s vocals taking the lead – before the baton is handed over to co-founder/vocalist Harriet Wilson for some same same but different with ‘Are You Looking For Someone’ and the superb ‘Whippet’.
But Morning Ritual has a few surprises up it’s sleeve, including the title track itself – where Wagstaff seems to have been kidnapped by some Tom Waits cytogeneticists and told to “do your thing, but a bit like us”. Beautiful.
There’s a couple more lounge room lizard footprints running up and down the album too, as well as a midway wake up call with ‘Never To Be Real’ – taking a play from the Daughter and Spaceman 3 approach to album track listing.
But you can check all this out for yourself by getting some of those less than wanted Christmas gift onto Ebay and buying a ticket to the Hare and Hounds for the first day of February.
And if my lazy alliteration wasn’t enough to convince you, have a stop, look, and listen at this… enjoy.
‘Whippet’ – Chartreuse
Chartreuse play the Hare and Hounds in Kings Heath on Thursday, 1 February – with support from Wildforms, as promoted by This Is Tmrw. For more gig info and links to online ticket sales click here.
For more on Chartreuse visit: www.chartreuseband.com
For more on Wlidforms visit: www.wildforms.uk
For more on This Is Tmrw, including full events listings and links to online tickets sales, visit: www.thisistmrw.co.uk
For more from the Hare and Hounds (Kings Heath) visit: www.hareandhoundskingsheath.co.uk
Independent Venue Week runs from Monday 29th January to Sunday 4th Feb, with more gigs at the Hare and Hounds and venues across the country. And North America… if you have the transport. To find out more visit: www.independentvenueweek.com