All Photo Credit: James Mitchell
Ecca Vandal Tears Down the Walls at Village Underground
Ecca Vandal brought the full force of Looking For People To Unfollow to London’s Village Underground. Tearing through punk anthems, hip hop grooves and moments of raw, soulful intensity. Joined by the magnetic Freddy Forbidden, the night became celebratory of resistance, individuality and the beautifully chaotic space between genres.
Ecca Vandal
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Released in May this year, Ecca Vandal’s second album, Looking For People To Unfollow, is a massively confident statement of intent from an artist whose star is rising at a rate that would make most peoples’ heads spin. Lying at a musical Lagrange point somewhere between high energy pop, garage punk, and funk-infused hip hop (with a bit of trip hop thrown in for good measure), she resolutely refuses to be pigeonholed into a single genre. And, while this approach could have resulted in a mess for less talented artists, her music has drawn plaudits from artists as diverse as Fred Durst, SZA and Travis Barker. She’s even had tea with Flea!
…People To Unfollow’s track list is laid out in a way that separates the punk-infused, alt-rock Ecca from the hip hop Ecca, but as her live performance demonstrates, it’s an artificial split that seems designed to give new listeners shelves for her music to sit on rather than reflect the artist’s own intent.
The disparate elements of her music stand side by side brilliantly and tonight’s setlist bears little resemblance to the track order on the album. Ecca has been supported on the UK and European leg of her tour by Freddy Forbidden. If you’re a fan of the headliner, Freddy will be an easy fit for you. He’s no stranger to blending genres himself; his backing tracks centred around sharply observed lyrics delivered with humour and self-awareness. Freddy’s music draws on influences from afrobeats, indie, grime and punkish alt-rock and on stage he’s all bustle, energy and interaction with the crowd.
With tracks taken mainly from his debut album Breach, released at the end of July, the eclectic audience is ripe for the strong themes his lyrics deal with – injustice, inequality, discrimination, political hypocrisy and what it means to be a young black man in modern British society. As an advocate, he’s impressive; as a performer, he’s a natural entertainer, and there’s a strong sense from tonight’s showing that Hurricane Freddy is coming in hard from the South to blow the London music scene away. It’s a potent mix that sets up the headliner perfectly.
Launching straight into “Eyes Shut,” drummer Dan Maio’s instantly getting a workout from the song’s frenetic beat. He’s consistently impressive throughout the set, with every track throwing up a unique rhythmic challenge. Ecca and fellow songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, Richie Buxton seem almost to have written the songs on the album deliberately to catch him out, but mostly it’s a measure of the complexity, variety and experimental defiance of Looking For People To Unfollow.
Ecca’s vocals are variously rich and soulful but also raw and angry, often in the same song. Her lyrics are self-assured but reveal a personality full of vulnerabilities, resilience, defiance and emotion. On “Do It Anyway,” she’s conscious of her bad habits and flaws, but chooses to carry on regardless. “Bleed But Never Die” is a statement of resilience and refusal to accept limits – “I’m running into walls again/And breaking out the other side.”
The set mixes little gems like “Then There’s One,” with its 1 minute 15 seconds of killer-clown-meets-mafia-movie intro and trip hop groove, and ultimate punk anthem bangers like “Cruising to Self Sooth.”
Unsurprisingly, the latter has become a massive high point for the live shows. She’s joined on stage during the song by, seemingly, every female member of the audience as the track becomes a joyous outpouring of strength, energy and solidarity. When a band opens the stage to the audience it commonly becomes a riot zone of spinning kicks, whirling male arms and stage diving. Here it’s a glorious middle finger to prejudice and the barriers women face in society.
And while many of her lyrics deal with inward or personal struggles, inspired by the period of self-imposed withdrawal from the world of algorithms and record companies as she and Richie wrote and recorded the album, there are also elemental statements about where she sees herself in society. “Ghosts” is a furious attack on historical whitewashing and colonial mindsets:
“You say that you see that you see us but you don’t/Say you’re dying to listen by you won’t/We'll tear down the statues made of stone/We're living facts that Brown and Black is gold.” Came here for the Loot rejects mainstream society’s expectation that marginalised communities should passively wait for slow-moving institutional change: “Left wing, right wing/Hear the same bird sing.”
And throughout, it’s clear the track order works better live than on the album. These songs work brilliantly at this packed-out venue, with its Victorian coal shed origins, and they finish with the appropriately relentless favourite “Sorry!Crash!”
Next up is the band’s first full US headline tour, with 10 dates in September and October across the country. It would come as absolutely no surprise if Ecca Vandal reaches the other side of this as a major star in the making.
Article by: James Mitchell
Plug In. Tune Out.
Ecca Vandal has built a sound that refuses to stay in one lane, colliding high-energy pop, garage punk, funk-laced hip hop and trip hop into something entirely her own. Vandal transforms those contrasts into a visceral live experience, proving that the boundaries between punk, hip hop and pop are far more useful to break than define.