- Independent UK Promoting

COG Review - 17/5/08 (Brandon Steep/Lodger/Gadsdens/Buster Shuffle)

Club Night Review

Saturday 17^th May at the Metro, Oxford Street

Bands: Brandon Steep, The Lodger, The Gadsdens, Buster Shuffle

Disaster looms around the corner they say. Financial ruin of the entire Western world, a pandemic of some poorly-named disease (bird flu sounds like a crap version of the real flu, where it just affects women’s downstairs and makes it sneeze), or some natural disaster will sweep this little island off to join America in to self-inflicted oblivion. It never actually happens, it just looms. It’s been looming for bloody years. And so people start to ignore it and enjoy themselves regardless. It’s called denial apparently, although I don’t know what a river in Egypt has got to do with anything.

Horrible puns aside (I truly am sorry for that), one of the many ways respectable pillars of the community enjoy themselves once the pills run out and the hookers’ scars become infected is to take in some live music from some of the best bands in the country, at the Metro on the first and third Saturdays of the month.

The first band to come on were Buster Shuffle, an exuberant 4-piece with a double bass and hats. They were mentioned favourably in the Sun. They kept going on about it. Upon further investigation, it turns out they were ‘given props’ in the Bizarre section of the toilet paper, in a little box on the corner so small research professors started throwing tomatoes at me to try to get me off the electron microscope.

They were good, the same way a Mars bar is good. You know what you’re going to get, you’ve had it a million times, but it’s still pleasant all the same. The first song they played actually showed more substance than most of their set, sounding like a lively Hamfatter track. The rest, as well as their available content on myspace, sounded exactly like a large number of new bands hailing from London. Speed Circus, Eight Legs and the Getaway Team all proffer this rock’n’ska sound, but although Buster Shuffle aren’t as good as Speed Circus, they certainly compare favourably with the latter two.

Their songs are more traditional two-tone, their lead singer and pianist Jet Baker pulling off an authentic air of rude boy passion as they hustled through songs about girlfriends, mates, nights out and other Socrates-inspired topics. This highlights a major problem with these new ska acts. They aim for the Specials, but what made the Specials artistically superior was their political and social commentary, touching on a wide variety of important subjects. Because nobody does this, they all end up sounding like Madness. Which is fine, except Madness are to good music what ejaculating on a picture of your boss’s wife then smearing his face in it is to career progression.

It’s almost as if they fear showing any emotion. It would compromise their manliness. Baker sings like the way men should down our way – proper singin’. None o’that emotional bollocks, just sayin’ wot you gotta say wiv as little melody as possible. On top of this, a number of songs relied on ‘uh-oh-uh’ choruses for their catchiness, which wasn’t even novel and entertaining when the bloody Kaiser Chiefs did it, and is now fast becoming a fly in modern indie’s ointment. But even this factor didn’t take away from a good, solid performance by a talented band.

In the last few club nights the second support act has been the ace in the hole, and more often than not the best band of the entire evening. The Gadsdens carry on that fine tradition. For a band with such an uninspired name (the lead singer’s surname if you wanted to know) they are astonishingly good.

They’re a five piece with a keyboard player and two guitarists when the lead singer picks up his acoustic, and the song structure is quite conventional, if catchy, stuff. But when the lead singer opens his mouth, they’re special.

Jody Gadsden’s voice has the timbre, scale, pain and presumptuousness of a real star. The warbling is not overly done, the lyrics are personal and interesting, and the music is melodic, and, at its best, haunting and touching. Reminiscent of REM’s ‘Up’ album, their material is piano based soulful pop of such quality that for them not become one of this country’s biggest acts of the decade would be a massive surprise. Their songs are more instantly appealing than Keane, more artistically credible than Coldplay, and more personal and poignant than anything Snow Patrol could muster.

Their live set is louder and faster than their fantastic collection on myspace. The majority of the tracks they played were different, showing an already large back catalogue without a single weak song. Tracks like “To Love You”, “Caught Up” and “The Sailor Song” are future classics, with intelligent, abstract and metaphorical lyrics lending longevity to music so contagiously appealing AIDS cells are employing think tanks to find ways of regaining their crown.

“Secret Diary of a 27-Year Old” was their most predictable and run-of-the-mill song, but it still blows most bands’ strongest material out of the water. If a band’s quality is judged by their weakest material then the Gadsdens are one of the best in the land.

The Gadsdens are a band that have solved the music puzzle. They’ve found a formula that works; that would lead them to create a great song every time they try. They give the impression they’re slightly older, wiser, and surer of what they’re doing than the majority of tight-jeans, loud-hair young bands out there. There has not been a more tuneful and soulful appearance by a vocalist in a long time at the Metro. Awesome.

It wasn’t fair for The Lodger to come on after them, but they still managed to make an impression with their instantly catchy power pop. It’s like Hanson for adults, which is exactly as wrong and yet oh-so right as it sounds. Oh yeah, but with a massive Britpop twist. There’s good guitar play, in fact good musicianship all round, and some hooky tracks to dance at a festival to.

It’s great stuff, with the one telling weak point being the lead singer’s voice. Recorded he sounds like Ian Broudie, but live he sounds amateurish. Despite hitting all the notes, he still manages to sound like Steve from Accounts Receivable being forced to perform a karaoke of a Shed Seven song because he’s new, making everyone wince at his crapness.

With some of their songs they sound like a Britpop resurgence band. Although their strongest track ‘Good Old Days’ sounds like a poppy Crowded House number, generally they are shockingly similar to the Bluetones. At times they make you rack your brain hard, because you could’ve sworn you heard these songs back in 1996. Despite this almost plagiaristic trait, their songs really are excellent. It’s just a shame that, at times, they sound like a tribute band of themselves.

With 45 minutes to go before the dealer came by with more pills and another set of yeast-infected, crab-harvesting whores, there was time for a headliner. Brandon Steep are a band making waves, waves that slowly erode the land on which a large number of promising acts have built their castles. The reason? They’re good. Live, the 5-piece have three people singing, and the vocal harmonics give a strange Bowie-esque quality to their sound.

Although their material is a little inconsistent, they benefit from excellent drumming in every track and a tuneful sound with a more thought-out song structure. They’re not the most progressive band in the world, but there is an element of surprise to each one of their songs that keep them an interesting listen.

Despite getting a large section of the capacity crowd to dance, some of their efforts appeared laboured, like the Coral without the West Country novelty, and some tracks were just way too traditional pop – almost competing with 60s Pans People for corny rubbishness. The last song they played sounded like if Idlewild sold out and started doing pop for the kids, but despite this their quality shone through.

Brandon Steep succeed in sounding like every other band in the current indie scene, but for some reason just a bit better. Their big hit single ‘HMF’ is like them on turbo. If every song was played at that speed they’d be an even more exciting prospect, but as such we’ll have to do with a good pop band close to breaking through.

Altogether it was a fine night of fun, larks and excellent music from Club COG. That’s Big Pete at the door, and he’s brought four confused Eastern European girls fresh from the lorry and a crate of Ritalin with him. That’s my evening sorted. Until next time,

Muhammad Odeh