Singer, Songwriter, A.A. Williams is a name that always seems to be accompanied with the prefix, “I tell you who is amazing live…” However, due to festival clashes on more than one occasion, we’ve not yet had a chance to test this most frequent of musical tips, so we enthusiastically grabbed our chance! We’re going to the hallowed home of cool music in the north, The Brudenell Social Club in Leeds, to find out what all the fuss is about. We are equally excited about the support act, too. Spotlights are a band that have definitely graced the speakers at “Devolution – North” several times, as they come, as all the best noise rock bands do, from the impeccable Ipecac Records stable. This combination at first glance seems a little strange, but we have seen stranger matchups over the years, and they’ve worked really well, so let’s get involved.
Spotlights specialise in a dreamier take on noise rock that is as weighty on riffs and tone as it is light and delicate in the most shoegaze-driven passages. Mario and Sarah Quintero are the husband-and-wife duo who front this band on guitar, bass, and dual vocals, alongside the phenomenal drummer Chris Enriquez, a man we’ve seen before supplying the powerhouse backbone for Julie Christmas. From the crushing riff that brings in Walls and its juxtaposed laidback vocal, Spotlights are one of those rare acts that can make you fall in love and bang your head in equal measure, making it sound natural and cohesive. In other words, musically speaking only of course, they’re both beauty and the beast in perfect harmony.
Tonight, they’re playing their glorious first EP, Tidals, in full to celebrate its 10th anniversary. The quality and class of this performance is just another of many reminders that all of the acts on Ipecac are a cut above the rest, if you lean towards noise rock in all of its wonderful guises, that is. During their quieter moments, as on the electronically enhanced introduction to Joseph, Spotlights display a light-as-a-cloud touch, and when they crash back in on its truly breathtaking crescendo, they do so in such a direct, precise way. This, in our experience, is something only a full-rigged power trio can do with this much unbothered heft. Spotlights utterly destroy tonight in more ways than one. Mr Enriquez enjoys playing this song so much that he decimates his snare drum and has to borrow another to play it in lightning-quick time! The efficiency of this turnaround is very impressive. Still, it’s the least impressive thing about Spotlights tonight as they rip into the only non-Tidals track of the night, the incredible barrage of riffs and emotion that is, Sunset Burial from 2023’s insanely good, Alchemy For The Dead album, and it is transcendent. Spotlights leave the stage in a hail of feedback and glory. We had high hopes for this performance, and they’ve been exceeded by a long way.
A.A Williams is a complete mood change from the moment the lights dim to a single white light and a large luminescent capital A. As the stripped bare, piano and guitar-led strains of Golden ring out, we enter a twilight zone of jet-black post punk drama as A.A.Williams plays her guitar with a wonderfully theatrical pluck as if it were a harp. Tonight, from the very first note, this singular artist has us completely in the palm of her hand and has completely made us forget everything before her, which is quite a feat given how great Spotlights were. As she and her minimal band surge into the more metallic part of her repertoire on Just A Shadow for the next hour and a quarter, we are totally and wholeheartedly entranced.
Onstage, A.A. Williams is, aesthetically speaking, how we imagine it would look if you commissioned Tim Burton to draw a fictional rock star, a queen of the dark hearts indeed. She cuts through the minimalist, monochromatic lighting with a swaying elegance that fits the music’s tone perfectly and brings a sense of a show, rather than just a singer and two musicians playing the hits. Sonically speaking, they dish out a sumptuous tonal mix that’s darkly romantic and also equally modern and crisp. On Dirt, dark country licks intermingle with soaring post-rock touches, and we haven’t even mentioned the main focus and the best hypnotic spell she casts in her performance: her voice. A.A. Williams is equally powerful and vulnerable, macro-focused and intimate, grandstanding and strong. Her range is a plethora of dichotomies, all with the space of a few bars.
A.A.Williams and her band’s genius lies in the fact that, yes, they make dark, dramatic rock and metal adjacent music. Still, they’ve subtly stretched it into new forms, as exemplified on tracks like As The Moon Rests and Melt, where she occupies a rarely tapped merging of crescendo-driven post-rock and obsidian black balladry to great effect. There’s a lot of innovation and imagination on display, but it’s handled in a cohesive, intelligent way rather than presenting it as two entities. You don’t notice the styles gliding slowly together. Another characteristic that is used so well in the AA Williams sound is their use of space. Like Spotlights before them, they play with a minimal setup, and in doing so, every single element has its own place to shine. As displayed in the excellent drumming performance, which, rather than showboat loudly, delivers highly technical micro shuffles and intelligent buried grooves under the melodies that don’t shout as loudly but deftly take this style of music into far more contemporary fields. The final sky-scraping choruses of the climactic, Evaporate ring out, and our jaws hit the ground once again in what has been an evening of total musical immersion.
We leave as total converts and now also agree that, indeed, you have to experience this artist live to fully appreciate the delicate beauty and overwhelming power of her music. She is the epitome of the always correct, “less is more” approach, and this works because every element in this performance was world-class. AA Williams was both pitch-black and pitch-perfect tonight, and we are truly under her spell.
Review By George Miller – https://www.facebook.com/oneflamemedia
Photos By: Thomas Hazlehurst – https://www.instagram.com/tommytogtog/
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Spotlights Gallery
A.A.Williams Gallery
