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Mirador caused a stir quickly. Fans queued outside for two days straight at their first headline show in Nashville – where co-masterminds Jake Kiszka and Chris Turpin, both locals in town at the time, cooked up their self-titled debut album. Subsequent shows in New York and elsewhere were met with similar rapture. A passionate community of fans, social channels and merchandise emerged.
How, then, would they fare on their first UK tour? Their first London show? Home turf for three of their four members (Chris used to live in Holloway), but relatively newer ground for them as a band.
The crowd at Islington’s Assembly Hall isn’t the biggest, but those who have gathered are clearly invested. Further back we see older punters, but the front row is mostly young women, some waving black Mirador flags, some who’ve apparently waited outside since 3pm, all of whom seem to know every word sung tonight. Bassist Nick Pini (a crackshot on the London session circuit with Laura Marling, Tom Jones, Nick Mulvey and others on his CV) wanders on for a quick sound-checking noodle, raising a ripple of excited cheers.
The lights go down. The preset tones of Jimi Hendrix, Freddie King and other bluesy fireballs of yore give way to low acoustic twangs, old folk fiddles, all very ‘rugged misty mountain’ energy… and then screams. Like, actual OMG-I-just-saw-a-filmstar screams, as Nick, drummer Mikey Sorbello (formerly of the Graveltones, now an in-demand sticksman), and singer/guitarist duo Chris Turpin (Ida Mae, Kill It Kid before that) and Greta Van Fleet’s Jake Kiszka stride on. Cool as hell, instruments brandished like weapons, on their toes and ready to rock hard.
The last time we saw Kiszka onstage was at a packed Wembley Arena. Smiling centrestage today – with the open, cocksure stance of a man who’s used to being adored (but isn’t jaded by it yet) – he raises a finger. More screams ensue. “You ready?” he says simply. “Oh hell yeah!” we find ourselves responding. Thus begins a two-hour (yes, two hours! And they’ve only got, like, one normal-sized album!) journey into the Mirador universe. The ‘Miraverse’, if you will.
Seldom has early blues been spun up in a way that resonates so much with younger listeners. You could say it’s just Greta Van Fleet fans excited about a new project – and there is of course an element of that, but this feels like more. From the first notes of Heels Of The Hunt, Mirador spin their own kind of incendiary old-world hoodoo.
They immerse us in another world tonight: a world where haunting hill country tunes are set to a heavyweight beat, where guitar solos can last for weeks, where the likes of Robert Johnson, Fred McDowell and Reverend Gary Davis are the ultimate rockstars, where cool jackets and pointy boots aren’t so much a fashion choice as a way of life… and, yes, where having proper, big songs really matters.
But more than that, they play the fuck out of these songs. Raider is ragged, raging and sensual all at once, slinky grooves built up with colourful wigouts and colossal drums. Fortune’s Fate is gorgeously Zeppelin-esque. Kiszka and Turpin’s close harmonies are quietly clever throughout, consistently avoiding the obvious. In interviews they’ve both described art-driven, ‘free-range’ childhoods – running wild from a young age, getting lost in guitars and poring obsessively over old music. You can hear that in the feral shrieks of Feels Like Gold.
With just one album, Mirador, they fill the rest of the two hours with noodling and jamming – a lot of it. Which is mostly dandy, given what thoughtful, interesting players they all are. They are obviously stoked to be doing this, and you can feel that… but no one would have felt at all shortchanged if they’d shaved, say, 15 or 20 minutes off the runtime.
That being said, Pini and Sorbello’s mid-set bass and drum solo section is actually kind of brilliant, moving from smoky jazzed-up beginnings into something powerful and angular. Heavy artillery with light touches and inventive twists. Pini turns the bass into an industrial-edged monster. Sorbello pummels his skins ferociously, then veers into a deft, tabla-style freakout. Genuinely fun to watch.
Plaintive ballad Must I Go Bound stirs a shot of tenderness into the evening – Kiszka and Turpin the picture of a rock bromance, for a moment, at the mic together. They have their own lives, their own bands, but their chemistry onstage is undeniable. The sort of fiery connection you wish more rock’n’roll sparring partners had.
They rock it up again for a mighty Blood And Custard, thundering on into one of our favourites Ashes To Earth. Jake plays guitar behind his head. More screams. More wigouts. Yes, they’re milking it a bit, but the overall effect and performance is so striking it matters little. (And anyway, our threshold for fretboard-based indulgence is pretty forgiving, as long as it’s done well – and, for the most part, this is).
Walking to the train, we catch snippets of conversations, some punters carrying roses handed out in luxuriantly stretched-out encore Skyway Drifter. “They were so good.” “Such a good band.” “Fuck me, that drummer…” Kiszka might be Mirador’s biggest ‘name’, and he and Turpin their main posterboys, but tonight they hit hardest as a unit.
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