Gig review: Garcia Peoples and Bobby Lee at Brudenell Social Club, Leeds

Garcia Peoples go further than most in their Dead love: the New Jersey quintet’s name must surely be an admiring nod towards the legendary San Francisco roots/improv band’s iconic guitarist-singer Jerry Garcia. Yet the New Jersey five-piece is by no means a tribute act.

There are nods towards their near-namesake's band in the guitar tones, song structures and multiple singers (four of the five band members take lead vocals), but Garcia Peoples offer their own idiosyncratic blend of psychedelic noodling, jam band sprawl, hairy boogie ala Canned Heat and riff-heavy roots rock muscle, with duelling lead guitars of Tom Malach and Danny Arakaki often hinting at The Allman Brothers.

The band’s albums have gradually drifted from loosely sprawling song suites and pastoral folk-prog fug to a punchier presentation. The more streamlined and brawnier selections from this year’s Dodging Dues stand out tonight. Even at their most direct, Garcia Peoples can’t ever completely resist breaking into thrilling quicksilver runs of duelling guitars. Attention is more prone to wander during the more eccentrically sprawling earlier material: with flutes and restlessly shifting song structures, there are moments that suggest much-missed folk/hard rock hybrids of Wolf People or, more divisively, Jethro Tull.

Occasional flat vocals and an uncharacteristically brief set suggest Garcia Peoples are not on top form tonight, playing to an unjustly sparse audience at what is their very first UK show. Bobby Lee doesn’t exhibit similar lapses of concentration.

The Sheffield guitarist has quietly become one of the most exciting prospects in contemporary British psych-rock. Lee’s two albums for cult label Tompkins Square are excellent, but their hazy, horizontal vibe is far removed the hypnotic grooves Lee’s trio cook up on stage.

Perhaps inspired by the open-ended explorations of tonight’s headliners, some tunes are allowed to stretch to marathon durations. Instead of self-indulgent noodling, however, the extra minutes add to the pull of Lee’s unhurriedly evolving music. A blend of homespun electronics, folk song structures, psychedelic guitar slingers and motorik repetition, the results drift engagingly from riff explorations that resemble Tinariwen’s desert blues relocated to the verdant greens of Yorkshire to energised glimpses of what might occur at a folk dance festival after the scrumpy has been spiked.