Bryde,The Cuban Embassy, Birmingham - review

This new addition was nicely done. Very much still looking a pub on the outside, the interior has been made up to mirror a Havana backstreet bar, including the gig room upstairs. While perhaps a little stuffy when full of gig goers, the tiny bar in the corner to minimise the trips up and down the stairs and bay window bench made it a pleasant corner of the live music world.

We were here to see Welsh songstress Bryde, who last weekend released her debut album Like An Island (see album review here) which we thought was a blinder.

She had a couple of young female singer songwriters in support, the second of which - Charlotte Carpenter - packed quite a voice into her little frame.

While this type of music can sound a little similar after a while, she did have two songs which pushed through to the memory bank. Blood Ties Part II, in memory of her grandmother, was packed full of emotion, while Fire was certainly stirring with her guitar set to grit mode to add snarl to her sound.

It was a decent warm-up from a thoroughly likeable person whose between-song patter was far superior to many artists of her genre.

Bryde literally rocked onto stage with her band to deliver her swagger-fuelled set to the pretty full room.

Dropping Honey as the second song certainly shook the cobwebs from the corners as her growling riffs set her beautifully soaring voice into impress mode.

She was having a few tech problems throughout: her mic kept reverbing and it hid her vocal quality sometimes, but like a trooper she took everything in her stride.

Dedicating Flesh, Blood And Love to a fight outside a recent hotel in which ‘somebody pretty much lost an ear, there was blood everywhere’, she had the crowd laughing and eating out of her hand.

The reverb actually helped for single Peace, the echoed vocals adding a degree of mystique to that wonderful chorus. The summer rock feel of To Be Loved was a swirling maelstrom of aggression.

And the thumping percussion throughout To Be Brave hit the mark as well, another storming number to see us off into the dusk.