Acclaimed U.K. band Still House Plants headlines a night of experimental music at Western Front, March 15

Led by Jess Hickie-Kallenbach, the three-piece squeezes something jagged yet soulful from its sparse guitar-drum-vocals setup

By ADRIAN MACK

Still House Plants.

Western Front presents Still House Plants at the Grand Luxe Hall on March 15 at 8 pm

THE LONDON-BASED band Still House Plants emerged almost 10 years ago from the Glasgow School of Art—and it sounds like it. On its third full-length If I don’t make it, I love u (2024) the band both hones its jagged and unpredictable songcraft while extending the emotional reach of Jess Hickie-Kallenbach’s vocals.

She’s an amazing singer: a yobbish Alison Moyet filtered through 50 years of cut-up experimentation, bursting with soul but scattered across a debris field of angsty sonics. She’s matched in every way by drummer David Kennedy and guitarist Finlay Clark, whose psychic bond as a musical unit demands lab study.

For the casual listener, Still House Plants somehow synthesizes a half century of marginal forms into this sparse but productive guitar-drum-vocals setup. Bummer psychedelia, ’70s No Wave, grime, glitch, post-rock, art-rock, free jazz—it’s all in there, but it never sounds like anything so much as the three-piece recently declared “the best rock band in the UK” by the serious heads over at clashmusic.com. You might even call it pop, although nothing this fractured and unyielding ever deserved to be so catchy.

Send your thanks to Western Front when Still House Plants makes its live Vancouver debut on March 15, alongside a genre-busting improvisational set from multi-instrumentalists Jairus Sharif and Mustafa Rafiq, both on loan from Alberta. 

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