Déjà Vega finished off 2024 with a low-key headline show at Gullivers in Manchester on Saturday night. Over a ninety-five minute set they delighted a packed enthusiastic audience with a mix of songs taken from their first two albums with six brand new songs from the sessions for their third album that showcase a different direction without losing the raw power and intensity of their performance.
2024 has been a year of consolidation and growth for Déjà Vega, expanding their fanbase significantly outside the North West where they've been one of our best kept secrets for coming up to a decade since Deadbeat Echoes morphed into this power trio that slowly but surely built themselves a loyal dedicated following, primarily on the back of their exhilarating live shows.
Tonight a hundred or so of that following have snapped up tickets for an intimate show to see out the year and for the band to reveal what they've been up to in the studio in the downtime between tours and festivals. The bigger than usual bank of synths and boxes of tricks on Jack's side of the stage gives a clue to what to expect.
The first three of the new songs - Crave, Can't Stop and Nightmares - are sandwiched between three old favourites at the start of the set. Mr Powder, Spitting Gas and Eyes Of Steel are staples of the Déjà Vega set and have the crowd going from the start and the new songs don't impact the pace or the audience reaction to them despite being unfamiliar. The synths are more pronounced, the instrumental sections of songs longer but they don't dilute the raw power of the trio, Tom's drums and Mike's basslines complementing their frontman's wilder stage persona.
The middle of the set takes us through some of second album Personal Hell's lesser played moments - Banshee and Harmonia plus the groove-laden Slow And Steady - as well as their disco tune Chasing and whilst these songs don't possess the explosive energy of the songs that precede and follow them, they showcase the breadth of Déjà Vega's work.
That breadth comes even more to the fore in a trio of new songs. The names of Techno Tom and Kontakt-368 give an indication of what's to come. Heavy synth-based long instrumentals with effects-laden vocals form the basis of these two new songs that show a more experimental side of the band and a refusal to just follow the same formula that has won them new admirers. The tightness of the trio still remains though, the unbreakable musical bond that they still know intuitively what the others are doing. The final one of the trio, Can't Wait For Another Life, takes some of that experimentation and wraps it around what's gone before to create a beast of a song that'll become a fan favourite straight away.
They finish with a bang. Catharsis and Who We Are, resplendent with cowbell, blast the pathway clear for their traditional ending of The Test, a colossal fifteen minute journey that contains more ideas than many bands manage in a career let alone a single song. Driven by bass and drums that give Jack the space to spit out vocals, lose himself in extracting new sounds from the set of effects boxes and knobs on his synth table and leaving the hundred or so fans ecstatic as they've drawn in and then released from the tornado that is Déjà Vega at their most potent.
Déjà Vega are on Facebook and Twitter.
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