Music

Powersolo

Hans Rolo | Thursday 5 April, 2012 14:08

The Railthin Brothers are a scary looking pair.

These two rib-pokingly skinny, gangly, tattooed Danish siblings front their four-piece rock ‘n’ roll band Powersolo with deranged vigour. They stare into the crowd with a piercing twin gaze that cuts through chatter, noise, attention and rational thought, gangly doppelgangers who terrify me in a way no other band ever has. They are so completely alive in the moment that there is no predicting what they might do. “These guys,” I say, leaning over to my friend, “look like two guys that could fucking kill you.”

Powersolo isn’t a gig you are at, it is a gig that has swallowed you whole, and you’re in the belly of the whale with the Railthin Brothers peering right at you. Their music is utterly insane, full of screeches and screams, the dark, clanging grooves of psychobilly and deranged new wave yelps, the self-evident-truths of the blues crushed into toxic paste with the in-the-red peaks of garage rock. This is a fearsome concoction that requires commitment from the crowd; when this band are playing they are holding court, and you fucking watch or you fucking leave. The venue disappears when they’re in your line of vision; a shabby pub becomes, somehow, the theatre set on which an existential rock ‘n’ roll parable unfolds.

Powersolo aren’t a band living their onstage dreams: they are a band living on the stage. There’s nobody else like them, and they’re coming for you.

Powersolo play in London tonight at the Blow Up Club.

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