Live Review: Pleasure Beach at Whelan's

The Belfast-based quintet that is Pleasure Beach have been riding on the wave of their hugely successful single ‘Go’ for quite a while now. No shame in that, of course – the song was a mind-blowing indie rock anthem that can’t be spoken too highly of. Coming out in 2015, it promised bigger, brighter things for the band.

With their latest single ‘Burning Up’ hitting the airwaves just a few short weeks ago, a headline gig at Whelan’s (only their third ever headliner, as they make clear) was always going to be dummy-run for new music. The weight of expectation was on them.
Helped out by Beauty Sleep, the appropriately titled dream-pop trio also from Belfast, Pleasure Beach come onto the stage after a frustratingly long lights show build-up. The impatient reviewer in me wants to hold this against them, but I really really can't.
From the word ‘Go’ (…), Pleasure Beach take off and never look back. They’re synth sounds like it was borrowed from electronic group Le Galaxie, guitar hooks are reminiscent of Kings of Leon, and Alan Haslam’s voice has the delicate delivery of someone like Ryan Adams combined with the stadium-power of Bono. Long haired, donned in a glam rock outfit and jerking with passionate intensity as he delivers the music, Alan looks very much the part; half of you expects him to break his guitar and pass out mid-set from a strange musical frenzy, the other half is worried he’s going to jump into the crowd and run away with your girlfriend.
Thankfully, he gets through the set without doing either.
Perfectly executing their more established songs from the Dreamer to the Dawn EP, Pleasure Beach throw in a couple of their new tracks for good measure (‘Holding Fire’ is only a week old). Most are up to the high standard that the band has set for themselves, with maybe one of the songs verging on sounding like an album-filler.
Finishing with ‘Go’, where Alan’s efforts to whip up the crowd by means of on-stage dancing comes at the expense of apparently losing all spatial awareness and spilling his beer everywhere (“I’m not drunk!” he maintains), the band leave the stage to a round of applause. This applause carries them back for an encore. They finish properly this time with ‘Magic Mountain’, a song which borrows a lot from American indie-rockers The War On Drugs and has some truly inspired lyrics (“Are you going to take me home?/I’ll wait like a mosquito in an ember stone, for you”).
An outstanding gig from some very talented musicians.