LIVE FROM THE PIT: Din of Celestial Birds, Wildernesses and Swamped

Dubbed as "one of the UK's most … hard working heavy progressive post-rock bands", DIN OF CELESTIAL BIRDS took to the road to play a number of intimate venues. Joined each night by WILDERNESSES and a collective of local bands from each area, the band played their recently released sophomore album, Takeoffs and Landings, from start to finish.

For the show at The Yard in Manchester, local post-hardcore band SWAMPED opened up the night. A sharp contrast to the pre-show playlist, their music immediately hit hard and hit loud. Most of their set pulled from their first EP Goltraighe, released earlier this year, which felt somewhat at odds with the venue they were presented in: heavy guitars and shouting were juxtaposed with shelves full of fake plants and the ‘stage’ comprised of a large, patterned rug. A harshness in the upper-mids from one of the electric guitars somewhat detracted from the experience, although it wasn’t enough to stop the crowd enjoying the act, with a number of the audience bobbing their heads as they watched. It was clear that the band were giving it their all, playing with focused determination. Not held back by a vocal microphone, their guitarist would venture towards the crowd and climb the seating, making the intimacy of the venue more apparent.  

WILDERNESSES were the next to step up to the plate. Much like their fellow performers, WILDERNESSES also released music this year, having dropped their debut album Growth in March. Pulling from this album, their set started slower with Four Hour Drive and ramped up in tempo as time went on, before returning to a slower feel for their final song Summertime, 1917. Compared to SWAMPED beforehand, their set was more melodic and less heavy. Lead singer Phillip Morris performed with a strong and smooth sounding voice, which would unfortunately get lost in the mix at times. When performing, there was great kinetic energy from every member of the band, giving an impression of them feeling at home while performing on stage, not afraid to lean into the tempos of their songs. This rubbed off on the crowd, with some enthusiastic headbanging and bouncing present among the audience. During a brief interlude to tune his guitar, Morris gave his praise to DIN OF CELESTIAL BIRDS as he noted that he had ‘not known stagecraft like it’, teasing an excited audience for what was to come. 

When it finally came time for DIN OF CELESTIAL BIRDS to perform, the crowd had closed up the gap that was present between them and the performance area during the opening acts. Their eagerness was met with the fast pace of the opening title track from Takeoffs and Landings, a dramatic and impactful launch to their headlining set.

Like the tide, the energy of the set had its ebbs and flows, slowing at times before ramping up again. Use of their own floor floodlights, as opposed to the venue’s overhead fixtures, accentuated the impact of their music, with flashes of light timed to the kick of the bass drum. Each member of the band was clearly putting their heart into the performance, not stopping themselves from rocking out and headbanging at the upbeat peaks of energy, emphasised with more intense flashes of lights, but calming down with minor key melodies and thinned textures before ramping up once again. When the energy was heightened, the crowd paralleled the movement of the band in headbanging and swaying, with an amusing two man circle pit involving WILDERNESSES drummer Ryan Browne emerging at one point. Some transitions between songs and their accompanying mood changes could easily have been called abrupt, if not for the use of samples from things like news reports easing the change.

While the venue initially felt at odds to the prior performances, it felt like a perfect fit for the headlining band: the lack of a stage separating the audience from the band allowed the band members to intertwine, both with each other and with the crowd, in a reflection of the ‘desire for connection’ written on the page for Takeoffs and Landings. As the crowd stood level with the band, the set felt more like a piece of performance art, emphasised by the occasionally blinding lights and the wordless - save for a single yelled  ‘cheers!’ of gratitude from one of the members - performance from the musicians. 

Traditionally, a din is a discordant, uncomfortable sound, but DIN OF CELESTIAL BIRDS is the opposite. Impactful and emotional music, portrayed wordlessly and intimately, never standing still for long. A show of theirs is less like a concert, and closer to performance art, best suited to smaller rooms so that you could be surrounded and submerged in it.

Words and photos: Ace Cheng