- Independent UK Promoting

COG Review - 10/1/09 (Look.See.Proof./Kaiko/Letters to Leaders)

Club Night Review

Saturday 10th January 2009 at the Metro, Oxford Street

Bands: Look.See.Proof., Kaiko, Letters to Leaders

There are times in your life when you’re walking in the street and someone smiles as they walk towards you. He was already staring before you looked, smiling fixedly. And you have to process more logic and imagination than the time allows - ‘He looks like he knows me. Does he know me? From work? No. School? No. Activities/sports? What activities/sports? I played pool once. Why is that a sport? If you don’t sweat it’s not a sport. So darts is a sport.’

And that’s when you realise he already said hello and stopped to talk and you ignored him and he’s following you, tapping your shoulder whilst thinking about who it’s more embarrassing for. Because he thinks like you. Because he’s your dad. And all of this happened because your brain is too slow, it’s arthritic limbs not able to pounce on fleeting information due to insufficient exposure to fresh new music. And where might I find this fresh new music, the ones of you still interested in this overlong intro might ask? Club COG of course, this time hosting the last club night of the Metro, soon to be torn down alongside the Astoria to make way for a giant statue of Roald Dahl or something.

This momentous event kicked off with the monumentally Letters to Leaders. Monumentally what? Monumentally something, that’s for sure. They’re a poptastic cool-kid foursome that got up, got up, got up and, weather permitting, got down.

Regular COG goers would’ve recognised them from the late September gig, but they appeared a little darker and more aggressive than the last showing. They didn’t sound darker, they just wore Emo t-shirts.

The kind of band that would’ve benefited from Busted’s demise by being the tweens’ ‘hardcore alternative’, Letters to Leaders are a marketing department’s dream five years ago. Attired in the latest tight jeans, retro jackets and side-sweep hair, they played conventional pop rock with, at times, pleasing lead guitar. The let down was the singer’s weak voice made worse by a whiny US-inspired post-punk delivery to a self-pitying yet self-aggrandizing, horribly naive take on ‘lyrics’. It seems as if their entire range of song-writing influences comes from ‘I Miss You’ by Blink-182, and they fail to even match it.

However, they do have some catchy hooks that may pluck rather than tug at the heart strings of the most sheltered loud-haired scenester girl. They are proficient with their instruments (the drumming also being a highlight) and their Green Day-cum-McFly brand of mainstream pop doesn’t exactly offend like the Wombats or Razorlight for example, but surely everyone’s moved on from this sound and would expect a little more than a slightly faster Goo Goo Dolls with less memorable riffs?

Something more like Kaiko, for example. The main supports came on and gently blew the first band away with their delicate indie. Not at first though. It’s difficult to win a packed crowd over when you’re as quiet and reliant on creating atmosphere as the unassuming four-piece. Even the TV sets they brought on stage didn’t help much. But Kaiko slowly ground away the cynicism through enchantment rather than force.

They have the air of a student band that in flights of grandiloquent artiness decide to experiment with indie music at its most basic level, and have stumbled upon a perfect formula for contemplative, subdued and beautiful pieces that unveil a little Radiohead here, a little Scott Matthews there, with some Nick Drake darkness tying them all together.

Kaiko have been on a Club COG stage before, and it’s a measure of their music that a generally positive review the first time round contrasts heavily with all this gushing praise. They only have two songs now on their MySpace page, but they are endlessly repeatable. The sort of music that grows on you is the most rewarding, but to have songs that combine hidden depths with instant joy is a rare talent. Songs like ‘Substitute for Love’ (not a Madonna cover) but especially ‘Don’t Dream’ are already favourites in the battered DVD case I call a home, yet no one’s heard of them. Indeed, it seems almost wrong to praise Kaiko - they’re a hidden treasure of a band and I want them all to myself.

They made way for the main support. Look.See.Proof. have, of course, the well-funniest name in the land and tha’. They’re making huge ripples (almost waves) in the industry with their unpretentious straight-laced indie. Their live performance echoed their MySpace collection, where they seemingly play every different style of indie song their contemporaries currently limit themselves to, from the heavily synth-led one to the ska-beat one to the one with the talking vocals – but anyone who’s invested heavily in Look.See.Proof, believing them to be the next big thing may have struck Foals’ gold*.

Despite having a number of influences they sound repetitive, because the one thing lacking uniformly in all their songs is ‘it’/that something special/a killer edge/whatever other common phrase people use for moments of quality these days. They have some good moments, but, as in their track ‘Standard Class’, for every ‘catch it kill it, catch it kill it, kill it’ there’s a shit Futureheads style ‘uh uh oh uh-oh-oh’. They look like they belong both together and on stage, they sound tight and cohesive and they’re developing a following, with over 100,000 plays of their song ‘Casualty’ on MySpace. They’re a top quality band without the top quality songs, which is a shame as they’re an amiable bunch who insisted in thanking the crowd every time they applauded and have the quite excellent Darkplace listed as their main influence.

Having said this, the packed crowd of largely their fans lapped up every morsel of their ‘life at the weekend’ stuff, and their set made for a busy and successful end to Club COG’s stint at the Metro. Hopefully whatever they replace it with will mean less dark alleys and questionable nooks, and more well-lit wide open spaces in time for the 2010 Olympic Pick-Pocketing Games. Incidentally pick-pockets prefer busy wide open spaces, because city people are generally in a rush and less suspicious in well-lit areas, so it’s actually less of a challenge. Still more of a sport than pool though. Until next time,

Muhammad Odeh

*- I’d like to apologise to my family for being associated with me, my friends who smiled politely when they read it, then turned and cried, the other Club COG guys, and above all you for having to read that ‘joke’. They are like Foals but not as good though, so it does work (still no excuse).