CityLife Rating
Everything Everything
IT'S a tough furrow to plough for a young band these days, the glory years of dole rock are long gone (it’s more likely to be call centre rock these days) and the sturdiest of MySpace/Facebook/YouTube followings is no guarantee of a career, or even a record deal.
In some ways it’s back to the good old days when bands cut their teeth on a tough live circuit.
This can only mean good things for a band like Everything Everything who manage to pull off the kind of ambitious arrangements on stage that many bands only have the guts for once they’re comfortably ensconced in a studio.
Bassist Jeremy tells a sweaty Night and Day that tonight’s venue saw the band’s debut just eighteen months ago, a short incubation period belying a performance that’s as musically tight as anything a dozen more road-weary bands could offer.
Lexicon
Even with the small handful of material available, EE manage to construct a strange and particular world for themselves, thanks in part to an intriguing lyrical surrealism with its bizarre, distinctly un-rock like lexicon of telescopes, onomatopoeia and Oxo cubes, plus winningly awful puns (tonight’s opener is called ‘Hey Jude Law’) and the driest of humour involving songs about the days after the apocalypse.
The music to paint these weird landscapes is characterised by intricate guitars, staccato rhythms, tight three-part vocals and a stop-start dynamic that can leave you unexpectedly breathless.
Debut single ‘Suffragette Suffragette’, with its pleasingly filthy coda, is an angular masterpiece played live, while current single ‘Photoshop Handsome’ is a mangled computer game soundtrack bolstered with military drumming.
Closing number ‘Weights’ manages to grow from spare and plaintive recital to near-thunderous epic in under five minutes.
Though they’re already quietly championed by local muso stalwarts Dave Haslam and Marc Riley, not to mention an appreciative nod from Johnny Marr himself, it could prove to be the making of EE that they’re currently unburdened with the kind of expectations that might yet crush tonight’s headliner Little Boots before a debut album has even hit the shelves.
2009 might be the year for hip girls and their keyboards but EE are proof if it were needed that a time-honoured formula of four boys and their guitars hasn’t run its course just yet.
Reviewed: Mon, 09 March, 2009
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