The Necks (live at Strange Brew)

Bristol
27 October 2025

The first forty-five minutes starts with a sparse piano melody and upended rubs, Chris Abrahams‘ fingers spidering the keys in rotating ellipticals. A touch honky-tonk to begin with, then slams more impressionistic. Circles within circles, letting in dashes of colour, a repetitive glow that has his fingers running the black keys one way, while his other hand takes the ivory in a differing direction. His pointillist punch metering the response, the shifting shapes weaving and scattering around it.

The rubbed cymbals, their brushed inflexions caught on the merge to a foot in a saucer of bells, Tony Buck’s energy percussively twining, taunting the four-stringed rub of Lloyd Swanton’s double bass that stretches between. His bowed then plucked transactions adding concourse, the transected bounce brightening in swallowed tapers, swerving in reborn relish, each musician compulsively tied to its gathering momentum.

That all-important hypnotic unison that each attentively drives towards until the density manifests, literally just appears and things lock into a gristled repeat full of vaporising trajectories. In this case it’s almost industrial — a buzzing solid wasping your head with its cavorting sibilance. A miraged montage, where you’re not sure who’s doing what, all reverberating in delicious tribal splashes. A beautiful release of structure hovering warmly in the ear, something to lose yourself in as the intensity eases away to Abrahams’ sticky darkness, the double bass inserting a bit of strummed sweetness that butterflies the road to silence in spindled reverb.

If the first set was anything to go by, the next would be highly anticipated. Chris announces they would take a short break, before giving us more of the same, adding with a chuckle — ‘well hopefully not exactly the same!’ – his humour mirrored by audience laughter as they leave the stage, waving.

When the second slice of action arrives, it takes longer to leap towards the transcendental than the first, wandering pleasingly in slippery sunlight and cascading signatures, some lovely interchangeable intrigue that skates and sonically shuffles. That almost telepathic synergy that skips between the three is amazing to witness. The endless possibilities unlocked, like a roadmap half-written by experience, the other rewritten on a tossed coin pileup… something that makes their music so invigorating and worth pursuing.

Humdrum jazz staples like drums / piano / double bass becoming innovative again, couriers to where maps are a thing of irrelevance. These three musicians slip out of the just doing and become a revolving evolve richly eating into itself, connecting up to this requiem-esque blurring of fractured shafts and hallucinating chorals. Pure magic that deserves that thunderous applause it finally receives.

Wasn’t sure The Necks would be able to better their performance from last year, but really didn’t expecting them to blow it clean out of the water.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-