Pale Harbour review – a 200-capacity basement, a band on the edge of something enormous

Four stars. By the third song, the condensation on the ceiling of the Hare had started to drip on to the stage, and Pale Harbour’s singer, Isla Reid, stopped mid-verse to point at it. “That’s the venue crying,” she said. “It knows.” The room laughed, and then the band crashed back into the song, and for the next 70 minutes a basement in Glasgow’s west end felt like the centre of the known universe.

The Dundee four-piece have had the kind of year that bands in their position are supposed to have only in films. A debut album, Low Country, released in March on a tiny Edinburgh label; a word-of-mouth surge over the summer; a run of festival slots that were upgraded, in two cases, mid-afternoon as the crowd outside the tent became a safety concern. They have now signed to a major and announced a spring tour of rooms 10 times this size. Saturday was the last date of a tour booked a year ago, when 200 tickets felt ambitious.

What makes Pale Harbour special is not easy to pin down from the records, which are good without being obviously remarkable: tightly wound indie rock with a Scottish folk undertow, a guitarist (Callum Baird) who plays like he is trying to get out of the room and a rhythm section (Fraser Doig on bass, Morven Lamont on drums) that locks together with almost telepathic economy. Live, the ingredient becomes clear. It is Reid, who sings every line as though she is confessing it to one specific person, and who has an unteachable instinct for when to let a song fall apart.

Several did, gloriously. Harbour Lights, the album’s single, collapsed into a two-minute wall of feedback when Baird’s pedalboard failed and he simply kept playing; the crowd sang the chorus for him. A new song, introduced as “about my dad, who’s over there, hi Dad”, was stopped and restarted twice and still produced the most complete silence I have heard in a Glasgow venue in years. The set closed with Low Country’s title track stretched to nine minutes, Lamont standing on her kick drum, Reid on the barrier, half the room on each other’s shoulders.

It was not perfect. The sound was muddy in the first 20 minutes, a mid-set ballad lost the room for the only time, and a band this good should by now have more than 11 songs. But these are complaints about a group who have barely begun, playing a room they have already outgrown, to an audience that knows it is seeing something it will boast about.

At the end, Reid thanked the venue, the sound engineer, the label and “everyone who bought a ticket in October last year and had faith”. Then she looked at the dripping ceiling. “Honestly, we might never play a room like this again,” she said. “So let’s have one more.” They did.