Champion Trees at The Peer Hat

A Duck’s Water Off My Back keeps circling a kind of stalemate. It wants out, but it doesn’t quite believe there’s a way out – and it’s too self-aware, too damn smart to just wallow in it. On their second album, the Cape Town-formed band Champion Trees render stalled lives and small defeats in exacting, wry and self-deprecating detail, set against arrangements of strings and woodwind far warmer and more generous than the mood strictly calls for – gentle enough to blunt any edge rather than sharpen it. Singer Francis Christie’s cup might “runneth over with hurt juice” (‘Richard 2’) But it certainly doesn’t sound like it.

The band began in 2018, when cousins Francis Christie and Lex Pienaar started writing together at the University of Cape Town. Their 2022 debut, NOW 3000, leaned on the close-observed pop of Beatenberg and Belle & Sebastian. Since relocating to London in 2023, the sound has thickened considerably: violin, saxophone, clarinet and cello now surround Christie’s plainspoken voice, adding a warmth the earlier, thinner-sounding record didn’t have.

In the album’s liner notes, the band describe three years spent “trying to lie really straight and flat and still” – waiting for songs to arrive rather than chasing them, gathering the results only once enough of them had accumulated to see a shape. It follows that the songs practically recoil from drama and overstatement, preferring to itemise a particular kind of stuckness in deadpan detail:

“I am a living American blonde / I am a young prince scheming for the throne that you’re on / I am the fynbos, resplendent with birdsong / I am an unabridged, illustrated history of ping-pong”.

The clearest reference point isn’t Beatenberg or Belle & Sebastian but Isaac Wood-era Black Country, New Road: the same unhinged specificity, the same nervy self-awareness about the act of writing itself, songs that flinch from their own sincerity. Anyone who still misses that version of BCNR will find plenty to hold onto here – and, to be fair, so will fans of the  “new” BCNR too, in all its gentler warmth.

Support comes from Troutflies and Kaspar Hauser, a South London chamber-pop and experimental band formed in 2022. Their latest album, The Pink Parade, gathers material written between 2018 and 2025 into a sprawling, 17-song collection moving through therapy, breakups, ghosts and birds – a similar appetite for storytelling and dense arrangement to the headliners, even if the emotional register’s a bit different.

A bill this interested in lyrics needs a room where the words can’t get lost. No chance of that in The Peer Hat’s tiny basement.