The Empty Page
Yes Pink Room, Manchester
16th May 2024
Hometown heroes The Empty Page have released a brilliant new Album and completed a short tour culminating in a night of red hot post, post Punk stylings, with added dry ice. MK Bennett was there to bear witness.
Mnemosyne was a Greek goddess and mother to the Muses, whose name means Remembrance or Memory, due to the belief that memory was so important to the oral culture of the ancient Greek civilisation. Oral history, despite the written word, survived and flourished, eventually incorporated into new systems and technologies. Punk, in its relative youth, has a full oral history with directly quoted documentaries and books, many now outliving its subjects and living only on memory cards and E-readers. Machines cannot reproduce memory, at best a subjective reproduction, a referent. Sometimes you are the history, you had to be there.
In a room not much bigger than your kitchen, Kel and Giz, the two nicest people in Manchester have something to say about several things, and in an electric and smoke-filled atmosphere, under purple-lit skies, they do indeed howl at the moon.
Big Nasty Palpitations kicks off, a brilliant previous single, Babes In Toyland meets Bikini Kill on a closed motorway, both the musical and actual temperature starting at a high mark and rarely decreasing, as Kel’s bass sounds violent enough to start a fight in a different, emptier room. You’re Tame could have many different meanings, insult, taunt or retort, it’s a fantastic thrash in a Pixies/Throwing Muses jumpsuit. Deeply Unlovable is in a similar vein but seems to turn itself inward lyrically before spitting its shame back, Kel’s voice on the voices is stratospheric, bile as righteous volume.
The Empty Page are not a Punk band, though they sit on the spectrum of every criteria of any decent punk belief, where unfairness and toxicity meet anger and fight. They are also loud, occasionally fast and very shouty, but they sit in that Punk-Post Punk-New Wave-American Hardcore-Alternative-90’s Alternative timeline perfectly, with the occasional lick of Joe Meek via Krautrock.
Life Is A Wave, the most recent single is a different beast, rhythmically and vocally expanding on the previous work. It is one of the best songs of the year so far, an aching emotional exercise in acceptance, where Kelly’s voice goes from John Cooper Clarke’s Northern bluntness to soaring Elizabeth Fraser beauty in the space of a couple of bars, and Giz, ever the showman determines to follow, in what becomes a race to rapture. They wisely decide not to try and beat this first crested wave but follow it with the simpler Smiths via Husker Du self-explanatory blast of Gorge (Oh Well).
Level Sedentary, is a fantastic Kim Gordon-fronted Sonic Youth if they had come from Lower Broughton, a guitar sound so angular that there aren’t enough mathematical one-liners to cover it effectively while Medication Nation continues its New York-based wonder but with a Johnny Marr intro. He’s Very Good At Swimming sounds harrowing, like the old Irish songs passed down through generations until it lands on its own contemporary version, drenched in stale sweat and feedback and the same meaning as it always had. I’m A White Hot Blade (Witches Are Wicked) is proof that Kel is a great narrator of modern politics and an immaculate singer, murmuring, and whispering low notes to birds singing in the tree’s high notes.
What Happens Now? Has that gorgeous synth push and another Marr-style guitar line, in what is the only 80’s style track they play, fitting neatly on the Festive 50 between Voice Of The Beehive and The Primitives, more light than dark, tonally at least, and in comparison to Leaf Thin, a tale of manipulation that equals its lyrics with a beautiful dissonance of almost Joy Division levels of bleakness.
Some of the crowd are here to testify, some are here to forget, whether they engender empathy, sympathy or delirious dancing on the spot, but then comes Cock Of The Fifth Year with its depressingly familiar theme of Toxic Masculinity and it is all delirious dancing on the spot, its Goo like groove makes the whole room nod their heads and move their feet. Hard to follow but the quick step excellence of When The Cloud Explodes positively shunts us forward to the wonder that is Dry Ice.
Something other than government sewage has got into Mancunian waters recently, as several brilliant young bands have taken to Motorik-driven Krautrock, and it is as welcome as the sun in a beer garden. Dry Ice is a phenomenal thing, melody, arrangement and sound are all on parity with each other, synths whirling in the background, guitars heading ever upwards. It is the only song to end on
Long after tonight is all over, those present will be happily haunted by the memory of it. Not by some machine version of it. They will talk of it now, of course, oral history never changes, only evolves through language, but sometimes, you just have to be there.
~
The Empty Page’s Instagram | Facebook | Website
All words and photos by MK Bennett, you can find his author’s archive here plus his Twitter and Instagram
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