Fly Pan Am

The instrumental collective Fly Pan Am have, thus far, lived under the weighty shadow of fellow Montrealites Godspeed You Black Emperor!. They share both a label, the wonderful Constellation, and a band member, the equally wonderful guitarist Roger, but their music shares only an instrumental aesthetic. Where Godspeed trade on blissed out, orchestral epiphanies, Fly Pan Am are alternately hypnotic and cold, funky and industrial.

The venue for tonights proceedings, the aptly named Underworld, is a dark, dingy hole with little or no character, and offensive bar prices. London now has a wealth of upmarket, beautifully designed venues, making the choice of this dive, essentially a last outpost for degenerative, reductive corporate Punk and Metal, a strange choice for a band of Fly Pan Am's calibre. My decor-prejudice aside, the venue succeeded in providing an appropiately intimate setting for Fly Pan Am's charged, bass driven workouts.

First up, however, were Scotland's Aereogramme, a post-hardcore outfit of sorts who offered a thrillingly heavy if occasionally uninspired collection of songs in a well trodden quiet/loud vein. The fragile melancholy of the band's vocals proved an interesting counterpoint to the inevitable bouts of bludgeoning guitar attack that sounded to these ears reminiscent of the sorely missed homegrown hardcore of Ligament.

Live, Fly Pan Am proved an altogether different experience than on record. While on their debut album for Constellation, intricately woven guitar instrumentals met with electronic dissonance and cold industrial textures often at a slow to medium pace, live the band are an altogether funkier proposition, wonderfully dubby bass colliding with the clanking, Krautrock-influenced guitars to form angular rhythms and propulsive extended grooves. The ghost of early Tortoise was noticable, while at times the band seemed like a more danceable Slint or Mogwai, particularly when they let loose for white noise attacks that increased in length as the set went on. Occasionally, the band's reliance on noise and volume (my right ear is still ringing) lost it's force and became tedious; there is, after all, only so much white noise a band can employ without it seeming like an excuse not to find another chord.

Overall, however, what could have been a dry, cerebral evening ended with an improvised bass heavy jam that sounded closer to the jazzy dub epics of Chicago's HIM than Godspeed!. Roll on the next album.