GaBLé Live at the Cube Microplex, Saturday 17th October
GaBlé are hilarious. Their performance tonight establishes them as bona fide comedy geniuses. Like artist David Shrigley, the French trio combine naivety with the macabre to create a world that is deliciously uncanny. Their songs, which rarely extend beyond two minutes, have a lyrical brevity and precision which maximises their comic impact. These vivid snapshots are made all the more effective by the multifarious musical backdrop which simultaneously builds the comedy dynamism, whilst elevating the tracks above mere comedy songs.
Mathieu, Thomas, and Gaella are unassuming figures; on stage they smile sweetly and nod modestly in response to the rapturous applause, seemingly oblivious to the idiosyncratic strangeness and scope of their musical vision. Take, for example, Thomas who from the left of the stage reads in English a list of random objects from scraps of paper concealed inside a cardboard box. (“Chainsaw. Arrows. Head-cutting wire.”) He does so as if it is the most normal thing in the world. When not narrating, he conveys emotion through a series of yelps, sobs, facial ticks and full-body twitches. Throughout the diminutive Gaella employs a fog horn, a Native American war cry and a tape player in bursts of unrestrained glee. Then there is Mathieu who at one point in the set dons an Elvis mask and launches into a leg- trembling version of All Shook Up. As the beats tumble around his King impersonation, the bewildered audience descend into laughter.
Yet each word and sound is deliberate, carefully chosen for effect. It is delightfully apt that to close out a song about unrequited love and an ugly duck, the threesome launch into a barrage of duck noises. Equally delightful are the songs about being eaten, the functions of a remote control, and the debauched acts of a drunk fox in London.
GaBlé offer up-close harmonies, recorder solos, delicate xylophone motifs, frenetic broken beats, guitars played with drills, and speech-impeded hip-hop: it really shouldn’t work, but it most definitely does.
Want more live reviews? Here’s Yann Tiersen at Concorde 2