- Independent UK Promoting

COG Review - 7/3/09 (Indelicates/Once A Thief/Cats in Paris)

Club Night Review

Saturday 7^th March at the Lexington

Bands: The Indelicates, Once A Thief, Cats In Paris

The gap was large. The winter was bleak and the time slow going. The emptiness that remained was filled with the click of heels to the tick of clocks. Eyes grew dull, faces lost their colour, and finally with patience wavering and hope waning, it happened. My RSPB annual pass arrived – renewed. One more year of bird watching action in protected wildlife reserves baby!! Yesss!! On another note, Club COG returned after a two month break for a re-launch at a different venue, the classy and larger Lexington, with bigger bands providing even more bang for your buck – just a couple of days after Jacko announced that something was ‘it’ and invited everyone to see his new play-dough chin live. Well, they do say great things happen in threes.

Oh yes, the shiny new COG promotion hosted, as ever, top up-and-coming indie talent from across the land, starting with the strange Mancunian kookmongers Cats In Paris. The threesome (they were missing a female co-keyboardist/vocalist) looked like a typical indie band on stage – their drummer appeared to be a Napoleon Dynamite stand-in, the bass player was the token hairy one, and the keyboard/violin/vocals front man probably made advertising revenue for being Chris Evans’ doppelganger.

The synth-based indie they played enjoyed two layers. Once you got past the initial impression that they’re probably self-indulgent students who’re some indie label executive’s idea of a practical joke, they actually have some good variation to their ridiculously twee compositions. The constantly changing vocal, keyboard, violin and bass arrangements are tied in nicely by well judged, deceptively progressive drumming. Their unashamed, deliberate eccentricity takes the direction of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and the Spinto Band, then goes further. The result is often pleasing, but sometimes a joke gone too far. They’re high on the whimsy, high on instrumental ability, but low on consistency. They bring the music down too often in their live performance so Michael ‘TFI Fridays’ Watson can physically change between keys and violin.

Some of Cats In Paris’ ideas are sharp and inspired – the song ‘Foxes’ sounds like latter-day Muse if they took meth and went camp. ‘Terrapins’ is also a great, winding composition. But unfortunately their overall image will remain that of a band intent on trying to sound ‘different’ as much as possible, and are ultimately a novelty many will take to for a short time, then discard. It was no surprise that the final and best song of their set was their most conventional in structure - on the whole still a welcome set from a fresh young band.

The new location was then graced with the familiar excellence of COG stalwarts Once A Thief. Constantly improving, tightening, and adding quality new material, OAT (they won’t mind the abbreviation) injected the night with some much needed pure indie rock. They played favourites like ‘Slow It Down’ and ‘Here Come the Junkies’, proffering the well-established London sound of high tempo indie tempered with two-tone and galvanised with punk.

OAT (seriously, they won’t mind) still took a little too long between guitar changes, but they get better each time I see them. The new songs are uniformly excellent, and they’ve culled the weaker tracks entirely from their set. What you now get is a band firmly set to go places and do big things.

Of course it wouldn’t be OAT (ok, they’ll be a little pissed off) without the tremendous ‘Satellites’ and, now cherished by COG regulars, ‘Sirens’ which thunders and screeches into life and keeps gaining momentum until you feel, like after having two feet of irritable bowel removed in an impromptu walk-in Mexican surgery, frazzled and optimistic about life. They finished with the more conventional but not less impressive ‘Ice Cream Headache’ song (that sounds like it belongs in a cheesy rom-com soundtrack, but in the best possible way) – and got a tremendous reaction from newly-converted devotees. As ever, honourable mention goes to the be-vested Hitman for his unwavering command of the sticks.

The main event saw a second outing under the COG banner for the mightily popular serial splash makers the Indelicates. They gave another headline-making performance to complete the live section of the night – playing their unique brand of indie-pop with pomp and grandeur. Much has been said about the Indelicates socio-political lyrics, but what makes them one of the most revered bands in the land is the consistently high quality and variety of their songs.

Call it stage presence, call it arrogance (well it is); lead singer Simon Indelicate has it in spades. Sounding like a lively, politically active, modern take on the Beautiful South (again, in the best possible way) they were simply commanding. The new material melded well into the set, alongside hits like ‘America’ and the truly excellent ‘Sixteen’ – essentially a cutesy verse repeated a perfect amount of times until it turns into an addictive song.

Of course there are exceptions – the ‘I am’ song was pretentious and dire instead of pretentious and good, and ‘Heroin’ is simply one of the most dreadful things to have ever existed (and I’m including famine and plagues) – if the Electric Six sung it, it would be hilarious, instead it appears to be a contrived love song turned ego-trip by a floppy-haired self-aggrandizing prat with not enough discipline in his childhood and not enough salad in his diet.

But still, with a tremendous set on the whole (and a well played-out encore), the Indelicates proved they were not just an exciting prospect, but the finished article. Their lyrics are hopelessly simplistic, misguided and not nearly as politically savvy or witty as anyone makes out, but it doesn’t matter because they sing them in earnest, and wrap them in music that, like Jade Goody’s face when she sucks on a pain-relieving lolly, brings a tear to my eye.

The evening didn’t stop there, of course – for the mad yoof of today, the superior resident DJ Papa La Bass, among others, entertained the bulging crowd until four in the morning – completing a re-launch par excellence for Club COG. The boys are back in town. Well, they never left really. And London’s a city. And – ah you know what I mean. I’m off to by binoculars that fit the rims of my glasses, so I can better stare at tits. Until next time,

Muhammad Odeh