I slowly made my way to the Escogriffe for Vincent Khouni’s release show for his new album “Accident”, my superstitions were high having just listened to his song about a bicycle accident.

Vincent Khouni’s set started off with a low resonant drone, kicked off by the drummer’s sampler, usually a good sign in any concert. It could have been the intro to a doom metal song, but instead the sunburst guitar fluttered through a series of classic indy chords. Instant dream. Submerged in hot groovy basslines, sprinkled over with the keyboardists soft sequences on a prophet. An age old recipe for success.
It was enticingly soft, and could carry you away into eternity if it wasn’t counter-balanced with Khouni’s soft-edge voice. He reminds of King Gizz’s Stu Mackenzie, or the Oh Sees’s John Dwyer; singing with a higher, nasal overtone, emphasizing drawn out vowels. In fact, the entirety of the experience had a sense of nostalgia drawing from mid 2010’s psych and garage rock scene. 

Around the middle of the last song, Vincent Khouni went full Kikagaku Moyo, diving off into the deep end of guitar solos where few find their way back. 

One of his pedals sent off waves of pitch modulation, which buried under a wall of delay, sounded more like a wailing siren than a guitar. Khouni looked in his element in these moments, drawing the large crowd’s attention even further.

It worked well within Escogriffe’s context, which historically has welcomed more indie bands than one could ever imagine, but I’m curious to see how the band would perform given more space. If this was Accident live for the first time, it felt less like a crash and more like something slowly unfolding.