- Independent UK Promoting

COG Review - 21/6/08 (S.T. Party/Le Shark/Doll & Kicks/Acusis)

Club Night Review

Saturday 21^st June at the Metro, Oxford Street

Bands: Screaming Tea Party, Le Shark, Doll and the Kicks, Acusis

Such is life that sometimes small things niggle you more than big, important things. Sure, the government’s just passed a law that means they can detain anyone who says anything against them under the Terrorism Act for two whole months, meaning this country’s now about as free and liberal as Cambodia in the 80s, but what really bugs you is that you can’t decide whether to have pasta or lasagne tonight. Lasagne’s nicer, but it takes longer to make, but it’ll use all the leftover cheese, but you were going to use that cheese to make the shape of Jesus on your toast and sell it on e-bay, but your e-bay account has been blocked because of all the stolen photos you sold of Kelly Brook nude. When she was five.

And suddenly you’re overwhelmed and all you want to do is listen to new live music at a convenient central London location, on the first and third Saturdays of the month (because you don’t like even numbers). Luckily such a phenomenon exists. Club COG serves up the best new bands at the Metro, as proven with an excellent night on the Saturday just gone.

Events kicked off at about quarter to eight with the pretentiously named but catchy Acusis. From the first song you know what they’re about. Bright t-shirts, skinny jeans and white trainers? A keyboard and loud hair? Surely this is some synth-based indie electro pop band with feel-good vibes and lyrics so clichéd you want to stab yourself in the cheek with a fork until your teeth start falling out? Yes it is!

Acusis are actually not bad at all. They’ve got catchy, hooky riffs infused with whizz-bang techno effects. You know, the kind of effects you used to do in music class when you were eleven by just pressing the ‘demo’ button. They’ve got drumming. Just normal drumming. Not horrible, not amazing, just perfunctory and insignificant but necessary otherwise they’d be Savage Garden. What strikes you most is the fact that they’re all about the music. There’s no attention seeking here, just Garnier hair products, rebellious Camden hoodies and jeans so tight removing them is akin to waxing.

On their myspace the synth effects are more – painfully – obvious, but live they’re a little more rocky. They may have the set up and lack of money of a real band, but they have more in common with McFly than the Editors. They probably sound a lot edgier in their heads. Their brand of sickly sweet sugary guitar pop isn’t nearly as sophisticated, artsy or left field as they think. It’s still good though. At times the choruses remind you of Feeder, and the predictable yet radio-friendly song structures play like a techno Goo Goo Dolls. Latter-day Goo Goo Dolls, after the good punk stuff, when they sold out and started writing love songs for girls who are too edgy for Take That.

Their quality is over-reliant on the singer’s ability to hit the high notes with power. When he isn’t busy making every song sound like an indie Meatloaf special, they lack the most basic command of language. ‘Everybody sing along, barara, bapapararah, bapapararah’. I’m sorry I don’t speak moron. They’re consistent though, the same way your bank statement is consistent. At times they have even less variety than being predictable, but they’re still pretty good. They are.

After Acusis came a band far less image-based. They had a platinum blonde lead singer wearing a tiny polka dot dress, an afro’d Omar Rodriguez-Lopez lookalike, a man showing off his anorexic physique in a vest and white trainers, and a hoodie-clad representative of the working man for a drummer (I say this only because he looks like a chav. He probably isn’t. But then again he almost definitely is.) They are the ultimate token band, covering all bases of eidetic gimmickry. They are Doll and the Kicks.

All their songs are the same. Start of song – catchy indie riff, Doll talk-singing in a Debbie Harry/punk manner, some verse setting up a story about someone hot/ someone about to be dumped/ someone about to dump someone else/someone wanting to be free from the shackles of prosaic existence etc, etc, then build up to Hannah Scanlon (the ‘Doll’) using her squeaky warble to end every line of the chorus with ‘ooooooooooh’ thus making it catchy and cool, and repeat ad nauseum.

They only time they don’t do this - ‘If You Care’ (that’s the song title, I’m not questioning your commitment to this passage) – they basically rip off the Kings Of Leon. But they’re not bad. No seriously. They’re catchy, and Doll puts everything into her cabaret-style live performance. Doll and the Afro man certainly have that star quality needed to make the front page of NME. They have the image and a sound that’s not adventurous by any means, but definitely their own.

Doll’s voice is also recognisably unique, like Debbie Harry crossed with a Japanese Bjork singing in the style of Beth Ditto, but squeakier and with a little less power. In fact there’s a strong similarity with the Gossip as a whole in terms of the style of music. Doll and the Kicks are actually superior in terms of overall material (although that’s not saying much), but lack that one big hit the Gossip possess. The cynical minded might judge Doll and the Kicks to be a marketing ploy. If the Gossip sold that many records, imagine how much more they’d sell if their lead singer was hot? That’s not the case though, and even so the Gossip got their fame because of Ditto’s obesity rather than in spite of it.

The lasting impression made by Doll and the Kicks is nothing. It’s not good, it’s not bad, it’s not memorable, but it doesn’t offend the senses. Repetitive to the point where you get bored in the middle of a song you’re hearing for the first time, but you don’t mind because the singer’s got legs up to her face. ‘Run of the mill’ is the clichéd phrase of choice on this one.

They are the antithesis to the band that came on next. Le Shark are deliberate madness gone mad, an artsy student band with disturbing levels of quirk, capable of sublime ridiculousness. And all of it quite serious too. They’re the Mighty Boosh of bands, with an accordion intro in the first song making way for theatrical whacking of the cow bell. The lead singer, going by the name Samuel Geronimo Deschamps, shows Doll and the Kicks how to be magnetically captivating without any effort. He just feels the music intensely, to the point of complete disregard of the crowd when he’s in the middle of one of their maniacal compositions. He panders to no one but because of that your attention is drawn to him.

They received rapturous applause from a fanatical crowd and are, on the basis of this show, destined for massive critical acclaim. (Although they’re too strange for mainstream success, I doubt they care.)

Their style is wrapped in their own unique take on experimental, progressive indie, but there are shades of Wildbeasts, Art Brut and Gomez. Deschamps’ voice is actually the most conventional part of the band (he sounds like a middle class Eugene Hutz), but his screams, angry punk delivery and riddle-filled unhinged lyrics are unique and refreshing. They not only possess a captivating abnormality, they’re also talented musicians who believe in what they’re doing and, this is the important bit, do it well. After the novelty fades the music has staying power. The only criticism of Le Shark is that a few of their songs become slightly repetitive, but this is a small fault washed away by a torrential storm of original, quirky ideas that hit the spot.

It was already turning out to be an evening of good music, but as it is Le Shark played the role of support in the quality stakes as well. Screaming Tea Party quietly came on, two boys and a girl, all Japanese. They started testing their equipment. After a few seconds of thinking, ‘my word, this guitar sound test is bloody loud – and is he wearing a gas mask?’ you realise they’ve started their first song. And yes, he was.

They’re loud. Very, very loud, heavy and just immense. Like Le Shark, their myspace output doesn’t do them justice at all. Their sound is the guitar-shredding, cymbal-crashing mess of the heavier grunge bands; not the Nirvanas and Pearl Jams, but the Mudhoneys and Tads, the dirty ones on early Sub Pop compilations. And you could say even those bands were more hook-laden and conventional. By far the heaviest band to grace the Club COG stage, their speed and skill put the other bands’ ability into context, and to shame. It’s not until you listen to a metal-inspired guitarist that you remember just how much more skilful they are than the average indie strummer.

There’s a similarity to Biffy Clyro with their directness, but Screaming Tea Party’s more experimental and very Japanese bent adds intelligence and charm to the noise it first appears to be. The lead singer had an excellent scream to him, which he needed in order to be heard over the guitar, which was played so vigorously they had a short pause mid-set to replace a broken string.

They then continued the set with the cutesiest of cutesy harmonic songs, the beautiful ‘Death Egg’, with 70s style harmonic singing from the whole band. It was wonderful watching the crowd get thrown off by the initial heavy stuff, then bewildered once more by this turn into Jesus & Mary Chain happy pop. The drummer’s feminine touch shows itself from time to time throughout Tea Party’s material, softening their sound and adding some interesting contrast to the straight-laced metal.

It’s clear they’re influenced by the Pixies and Nirvana in terms of song structure and some of their riffs, but on the whole their sound is all their own, and like beating a retard because he can’t read, it’s both savage and heavenly. Yet another excellent round of acts at the Metro were topped off with a very memorable headlining band that should, in a perfect world, be playing the main stage at Reading in August while the Automatic’s limbless torsos are discovered in the Thames.

But such is life. It’s unfair. After finally deciding on something following hours of torturous to-and-fro, you discover there isn’t enough cheese in the first place. Pasta it is.

Muhammad Odeh