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It doesn’t take particularly long to clear one band’s gear and get the next ready, especially when the house tech staff and band members work together to make it all happen. Sometimes, it’s difficult to tell them apart. Slift, a trio from Toulouse, France, did just that, brothers Jean and Remi wearing baseball caps, looking as much baristas as psychedelic power trio rockers. Then, they take the stage, turn the gear on, the hair starts flying, and they’re in beast mode.
Headlining their first U.S. tour and stopping at Atlanta’s East Atlanta Restaurant and Lounge (The EARL), their 16th of 19 stops within a month showed no signs of weariness from coast to coast travel and the requisite time changes. And how could there be? Beginning their set with the high velocity title track from their 2020 album, Ummon, and continuing with a setlist of others from the album, there’s no rest for the weary in an album packed with energy.
If you like a fiery electric guitar, you’ll like this band. Guitarist Jean Fossat is quite something to watch. He writhes like a tornado only… there’s that one effects pedal that tethers him in place, his body otherwise reaching for other areas of the stage.
When songs or parts of them include a frenetic pacing of jazz, prog, heavy metal and perhaps early Pink Floyd psychedelia influences, it doesn’t leave much space to take a breath and strum a melody. He sings, too, but their lyrics are, appropriately, as obtuse and “out there” as their album and EP cover art. Such as the entire lyric to “It’s Coming…”:
I saw in every restless dream a city
Floating towards infinity
And now it starts talking to me
The City says something to me
White noise, white noise eternally
His brother Remi is less attached to his bass pedals, and he often brings harder punk aggression to many of the songs, with the flexibility to thrash about the six square feet of space permitted on this particular stage.
Drummer Canek Flores plays close to the front of the stage on a fairly simple set. For a high-energy performance, he deceptively keeps his wing mates grounded, his face both calm and evidently satisfied.
Ummon is getting decidedly great reviews, and the audience, and particularly those in this sold-out venue, expects great things in the live performance. Slith delivered. Never mind the two opening acts, this was one of those shows that at one hour (including a 15 minute closer), it’s enough to leave the audience and the band exhausted. Ummon was pretty ambitious for a second album, and the future should be very interesting for this band.
The EARL was a well suited introduction to Atlanta for the band. It’s large enough to host rising bands like Slift, but small enough to remain intimate. There probably isn’t room to properly install a projector at a short distance from the backdrop, and the always kinetic images splashing across the band members from afar emphasized the energy of the music.
Openers included You Said Strange, a daily double from France, this band from Normandy (also singing in English). The group played a very pleasing set, quite a bit more aggressive and psychedelic than the Indie-ish songs on their most recent album, Thousand Shadows Vol. 1, would suggest.
East Atlanta’s The Mltys began the evening with a solid set of songs and guitar solos to get the evening started.
