REVIEW: Louise Distras @Leeds The Packhorse

rattlemag
Apr 25, 2016
3 min read

The United Kingdom has always been a launch pad for some truly inspiring musicians. They seem to often rise from places of semblant mundanity and transform rows of synonymous brick homes into something infused with a gravitational musical magic. If you need an example, then think no further than of how The Beatles have changed the face of Liverpool forever. Now, awakening in a West Yorkshire town called Wakefield, on the edge of the Pennines, is the rising dynamic of an artist known as Louise Distras.

Distras has been doing the rounds on punk and indie scenes from the UK to California for several years. She has played both as a solo acoustic artist and also with a fully amped up band. It seems a little too easy to liken her to The Distillers Brody Dalle, to whom she bares an immediate resemblance, and certain vocal quality. Assuredly not a bad thing, but a touch cliche nonetheless. I'll have it be known that despite these shared qualities, Louise Distras is already a woman in a league of her own.

If she owes much of her shading to the punk scene, she also undoubtedly broadcasts on several other frequencies simultaneously. Perhaps if, under some odd instance, Billy Bragg wrote a song for Pink! and then Rancid covered it, such might come somewhere close to explaining what you hear when Distras proffers. However even that seems like a weak premise for the revolution that this artist is selling. The art and the urgency in her music speaks for itself, she weaves a lyrical ribbon of fist clenching demand and uses it to lace the boots of a floor stomping drive of drums and heavy folk tinged guitar. Her observance is critical and direct, and she sells it with strength and melody.

It takes a gifted musician to give harmony to dissonance.

Tonight Louise Distras is warming up with a new band. She tells me that from here on out, she will be saving her acoustic sets for more intimate settings, it will be the trapping of special occasions. This is almost a hometown show. The venue is a tiny room above The Packhorse pub in Leeds. There are perhaps 28 people in attendance and I am already thrilled to see an artist of her magnitude in such a setting before she has even placed one foot on stage. She will be playing with Iain Allen on Bass, and Richard 'Titch' Lovelock on drums, both denizens of Hull whom are also members of a two-tone band called 'The Talks.'

They launch the small crowd into a state of alertness (which probably goes deeper than most of us realize) as they come onto the stage swinging, with two sucker-punch songs 'Stand strong together' and 'Shades of hate', which between them, in her truest form, boast unflinching social heed and incisiveness flung forth in their words. Other notable highlights include one of her most popular songs 'Bullets', and the more stripped down 'Story is over', which is somewhere between Nirvana's Lithium and exerts of the lesser known welsh rockers Funeral For a Friend's 2007 album 'Tales Don't Tell Themselves'.

Her stage presence is sober and her delivery is certainly not shy. Why should it be? Her vocals are a husky, sonorous treat whose surprising peaks are capable of giving goosebumps.

3 brand new songs are also debuted to us, namely 'Outside', 'Aileen', which could have been written by David Bowie in the clutches of a rage, and 'Black Skies', which is pure Brit Punk.

By the end of the night I am left with no qualms about two things. The city of Leeds loves to party - AND- Louise Distras is a spectacular poet of candor and rat race agnosticism , a vital addition to any punk play list and beyond.