Another music in a different kitchen. The Belgrave Music Hall and Canteen is the newest kid on the Leeds’ bar and live music block. Originally the Leeds Children’s Palace, this former recreation hall and, far more recently, snooker hall has now been totally refurbished and re-opened its front doors only ten days ago. When it did it breathed much needed new life back into the city’s jaded Northern Quarter. Tonight it welcomes up its three flights of stairs and into its rather excellent 200 capacity performance space Active Child, Jarbird and, first The Horn The Hunt.
The Horn The Hunt is Joseph Osborne and Clare Carter. He plays guitars and is considered to be pragmatic. She sings and is undoubtedly artistic. Their balanced combination of technical prowess and creative ideology forms the most perfect of unions. They also happen to be husband and wife and 
together they are surely Yorkshire’s very own Sonny and Cher for the modern popular song.
This evening offers them an opportunity to showcase material that will appear on their soon-to-be released but not-as-yet officially named third album. By way of marked contrast to its predecessor, 2011’s Depressur Jolie, this record has only live instrumentation, is purely analogue, and in so being has placed a considerable distance between itself and a previous emphasis upon the art of programming. To then have to recreate this as a duo in the live setting could quite easily prove to be a challenge but on tonight’s evidence it is one that The Horn The Hunt can clearly meet.
They open with ‘Gold’, a brooding presence of a song that initially hovers ominously over the barren Spanish tundra of its inspiration before erupting into one God-almighty blaze of analogue synth, guitar and voice. It is a remarkable statement of intent. Recent single ‘Black Fire’ makes an early appearance in the thirty minute set, the delicate beauty of the song’s melody quietly underscored by Osborne’s textured guitar. It creates a moment in time when Alison Goldfrapp flirts outrageously with the memory of Polydor years’ Link Wray.
The rumbling sensuality of ‘A Deeper Kiss’ creates a wide open, organic space of sound into which Carter’s mercurial voice just slides. This is pop music for grown-ups, big on character, strength and personality. This instalment of it, though, is all over way too soon leaving in its wake a temporary emptiness inside the Belgrave Music Hall. But you can help to fill that void by getting yourself onto the emerging The Horn The Hunt band wagon pretty damn quick before it leaves this town for a much bigger place.
