The Vortex - Club Designer Magazine @ Bar Amp - 5.3.07

It will become one of those I was there moments with just a handful of people here to witness North Manchester's The Vortex deliver anthem after anthem. While the council pop scene has brought us bands that brought it back to working class Manchester rather than art school ponces or dull as ditchwater singer-songwriters, it's not delivered a band capable of aiming
for the dizzy heights of Oasis or the Roses. The Vortex are the band with those aspirations and piss on the Madchester posturing of the Twang from a heights bigger than the Beatham!!

Until the Kaiser Chiefs pretended to be Blur, The Killers thinking they were from Manchester and Snow Patrol masquerading as being Scottish you always knew where a band came from the first few bars. Despite latter-day confusion there's no mistaking where The Vortex are from with the Mancunian swagger, robust heavy as f**k riffs and the techno stylings. More importantly these songs are massive with "Messiah" dwarfing the whole of Kasabian's career and most of Ian Browns solo output. "Oblivion" is almost nu-rave in it's sound with heavy riffs mixing up with the sound of the KLF's techno output while
"Ascension" is a low-key trippy ballad.

If other gigs have been about jumping off stage and beating up hecklers, fending off the headliner bands lead singers girlfriend and mad for it debauchery then this set brought it right back to the music with a small but influential number of people from the manchester music scene down to watch. There's nothing that's gonna get in way of the Vortex's road to success and if there was a time for a band like the Vortex then that time is now!!

Alex McCann

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