California 3 piece julie (lower case – obvs) have the pop-crazed youngsters moshing with their iPhones in the air like they just don’t care

julie have made quite an impression it seems and have a sold out tour of the UK ahead of them and I just make it in time to catch the unusually early start of 8.15 (which no amount of scouring the Gorilla or SJM ‘socials’ would reveal) so I’m in a narky mood as the loud strains of opera emanate from the empty stage as the capacity crowd gear up for julie. This had better be good.

It is good. The band take to the stage to a trouser flapping bass rumble and the crowd go absolutely nuts as they crash into the first tune ‘catalogue’ (lower case).

julie have acquired that inevtiable Shoegaze or Nu-Gaze tag but fundamentally it’s not the swoonsome Slowdive or Cocteau Twins that is the obvious inspiration here. It’s the scuzzier, Squatney, cheap cider-fuelled end – we’re talking ‘Isn’t Anything’ and ‘You Made Me Realise’ era My Bloody Valentine – hyperactive drums, waves of distorted guitar and bass – with a big nod towards Swervedriver particularly in terms of that mix of grungey guitars with warm, widescreen melodic washes – and the dissonant wanderings of Sonic Youth. Yes!

The stage is minimally set up, no backdrop just some big amps and white light and occasional strobes. The 3 piece line up in formation – bass – guitar – drums in that order – and while they don’t say much, julie deliver a physical and visceral performance. The guitarist Keyan and singer/bass Alexandria vanish quite often either to mess with their pedals or roll around on the floor or whatever. There are long periods of tuning up and re-setting which the band wisely fill with sampled noise and a chance for their unflappable drummer Dillon to loose off some mad freeform drum fills – raising the tension before the next big riff comes in.

The crowd is definitely a younger demographic although like me there a few veterans of the first wave of 90s Shoegaze but the pop-crazed youngsters are crushing down the front to enjoy a proper mosh – albeit with phones aloft which will make for some very shaky footage. There’s a telling moment in this video of a julie performance where someone does the very 90s thing of stage-diving – albeit the diver is filming themselves as they go down which will probably make for a great Tik Tok vid …kids today eh? That said I like this quote from Keyan in the NME which really endears me to them:

“If more artists focused on art and music and playing live rather than social media, they’d be just fine”

It was a literally a blast – very, very loud performance with tons of intensity and attitude and I suspect next time julie come to Manchester it’ll be New Century or The Ritz and don’t sleep on it when the tickets go on sale. They’ve clearly got what it takes to build up an audience and create a certain weirdness and mystique around themselves around them which is very difficult to to do in the 2020s. If they have one shortcoming it’s perhaps the adherence to that My Bloody Sonic Swervedriver template but I suspect they might have a change of direction up their skinny sleeves – and indeed those confrontational between-song noise-fests are an indication of how ready julie are to challenge and face-off their audience – suffice to say the kids seem ready to take whatever julie can throw at ’em.

Fly julie fly…