halfofwhat: che bella!

09/02/03, Cardiff Barfly: The Star Spangles, David David (link?)

The singer in David David has a guitar which refuses point-blank to stay in tune: he spends each gap between songs plucking out notes and wincing. It's sort of charming, though, since the actual songs when they arrive are quality - some truly bitchy lyrics, choruses just crying out for a harmony which neither the perma-cigaretted synth player nor disturbingly metal bassist will provide.

Coming from New York City to play basement indie venues in the UK appears to be a prerequisite nowadays. Britain is open to any American group with guitars and an obvious back-hearkening to a particular decade - the seventies for the Strokes, the eighties for Radio 4. For The Star Spangles, it's the sixties. Actually, that's a simplification: for the Star Spangles, it's the Rolling Stones and the Small Faces having a punch-up with Oi!Punk in a dimly-lit alleyway. This nattily-dressed quartet produce a fearful racket, unison-shouting choruses and the guitarist stomping about in ever-decreasing circles, and it's utterly fantastic. There's nothing louche about this band, nothing lazy: they invite their friends up on stage to dance about and shout out the lyrics to 'Party', the guitarist and bassist swopping or even sharing microphones. Even the poor sound quality and complete din can't disguise the fact that these are more than decent tunes, and an atmosphere of huge fun. In fact, if it wasn't for the shit name, they could almost be a great band.

25/01/03, Water Rats: Lumiere, Lamotta, The Vinyls (link?)

The lead singer of The Vinyls, a troupe of skinny indie people playing skinny indie music, is rocking the Karen Carpenter-Chrissie Hynde look, all long hair and inappropriately large sunglasses. She slings her acoustic guitar behind her back like a messenger bag and has to correct her own lazy London pronounciation to make song titles understandable, and breathes incomprehensible lyrics to sweet and forgettable songs.

Lamotta are no less indie, but nowhere near as sweet: the spiritual brethren of Shed Seven, they chug through honest tunes with robust riffs, the singer contorting his face like a monkey and then going on about being King Kong and two feet long. Their musical competence can't be doubted - when the alarmingly rugged drummer manfully fluffs an entrance, the only sense of mistake is in the tolerant faces they make in his direction. Unfortunately, their musical pedigree can: any band, however charming, who rearrange the stage for a mournful and quite frankly flat acoustic ballad have been taking their tips from the wrong manual.

Fuck knows what manuals Lumiere have been working from, but they're definitely the right ones. Four unnaturally pretty young men in varying gradations of leather trousers, tight t-shirts, sub-Adam Ant Jackets and dyed-black androgoth hair, everything they lack in tunes and decent lyrics they make up for in sheer presence. The singer charismas about the stage as if this isn't a poky little indie venue in King's Cross and there are thousands of baying fans echoing his every raised-arm handclap; the Audrey-Hepburn-beautiful synth player pouts into the distance and presses a few perfunctory programmed keys; the guitarist alternates between irony-free devil's hand signs at the audience and squalling feedback. This band is having so much fun, are so assured of their future rockstar status, that it's impossible not to like them. The chances are they won't get far, but so long as they behave like they're already there, who cares?