Mk.gee live in London: a new kind of guitar hero

It’s hard to know whether Mk.gee wants to be a rockstar or not. After bubbling under with a series of intriguing but low-key releases over the last half-decade, Mike Gordon’s debut album, February’s Two Star & the Dream Police, brought him a legion of rabid new fans, slots on late-night US television (with an SNL appearance to come) and an endorsement from Eric Clapton who hailed him as the brightest new guitarist around.

On the album, he makes songs that are beautifully pristine at their core, recalling Sting or Phil Collins, before mangling and distorting them with innovative and unusual production. It sounds like ‘80s radio ballads filtered through the post-production of Bon Iver’s 22, A Million or Frank Ocean’s Blonde, and remains one of the year’s most thrilling debuts.

While there’s a clear path evident for Gordon to hit arenas and become a bona fide rockstar, the only issue that remains is whether he wants it or not. The obscuring of the songs on his album through their production shows a clear intention to swerve easy wins, and at the last of his three sold-out shows at London’s Electric Brixton on Halloween, things get even weirder.

For the first three-quarters of the gig, Gordon and his two bandmates – guitarist Andrew Aged (dressed in wraparound sunglasses and with a hair metal guitar) and drummer/programmer Zack Sekoff (who starts smoking a pipe towards the end) – are entirely backlit, with no light on their faces and only smoky silhouettes viewable from the crowd.

The music from Two Star is also further manipulated and disfigured during the show. While Mk.gee’s extraordinary and unique guitar playing is distinct on the album, here it drives the whole thing. The end of the otherwise tranquil ‘You Got It’ is marked with raucous shredding and metal levels of distortion, while ‘I Want’ turns into an industrial racket. Album opener ‘New Low’ also gains a fierce electronic drum beat and takes its already unique structure to even stranger places.

There’s also a sense of gentle trolling and overall absurdity to Mk.gee, light relief in a show that is both pulverisingly heavy and shiveringly intimate at points. Towards the end of the set, he plays album track ‘DNM’ three times in a row, nothing compared to the 12 renditions at a recent show in the US that hit media headlines and meme pages alike. By the time of the third rendition of the sprightly track, a moshpit breaks out and support act SEES00000 is crowdsurfing in a wolf mask.

Then there’s his brilliant new Police-ish single, which is titled ‘ROCKMAN’, features artwork of a gun being pointed at a modular synth, and is played to both open and close tonight’s show. Elsewhere, the “it’s Britney bitch” sample from ‘Gimme More’ rings out before the start of ‘New Low’ to an equal amount of puzzled chuckles and delighted whoops from the crowd.

In the last 10 minutes of the show, after being convinced Mk.gee is determined to exist in the shadows and simply wink at the idea of stardom rather than embrace it, a rendition of his divine single ‘Are You Looking Up’ sees his face lit on stage for the first time, and the arena rockstar within gets unleashed.

At the song’s apex, he plays blistering, chunky chords that you swear could fill any room in the world, before emerging for the encore and standing with his arms outstretched, greeting the crowd through a sea of fog like a true Gallagher. As if further testing his credentials, he then lets the crowd sing almost the entirety of the unlikely anthem ‘Alesis’, and is greeted with the kind of hero worship that’s guaranteed to keep growing if he lets it.