When you arrive at a gig and there are more men with beards than there are women of any kind, you expect to see chin stroking aplenty as skinny guys play intricate and intellectually challenging guitar parts. You don’t expect stage invasions and rousing raucous rock and roll. Yet that’s exactly what this triple lineup of noisemongers produce tonight.
Lovvers sound retro. Not retro like they’re just ripping off old songs. Retro like they are actually an early 1980s punk band. Like they were actually there. Like in a 1980s teen movie when the rebel character goes into a grotty little club to watch a band – Lovvers are that band. Like when you’re a teenager and you download a song because you heard it was an influence on Kurt Cobain, and you’re not sure you really ‘get’ it but you know it’s good – Lovvers wrote that song. Can a band so old fashioned really be relevant? When they sound this vital then the answer is “hell yes!”
Lovvers are what punk is supposed to be: heavy, hard and shouty but essentially three-minute pop songs with plenty of hooks. Singer (or perhaps vocalist is more appropriate) Shaun Hencher screams his way through a slowly awakening audience, but it is Henry Withers’ melodic guitar licks that really entice and keep you listening after your in initial excitement has abated.
A term like ‘experimental punk rock’ is confusing at best and mostly just an apparent contradiction. Wasn’t punk supposed to kill off all that weird proggy shit? HEALTH certainly exhibit plentry of fret wankery; in fact, when they stop thrashing about long enough for you to catch a glimpse of their faces, it looks as if they’re really having a wank – mouth open, eyes closed in a kind of tired, almost pained ecstasy orgasm face. It might occasionally verge on the ridiculous, but HEALTH take their music seriously.
The first few songs come across like derivative shite, but as more and more weird keyboard noises emerge, things become a lot more interesting, hypnotic even. As the long haired vocalist/pixie prances around the stage, limbs a-flailing, you realise those screams aren’t coming from his mouth. They’re coming from the effects pedal, as if somebody’s soul were trapped inside; like the sounds you’d expect to hear emanating from the Ghostbusters’ trap. Ghoulish.
It’s with the appearance of tonight’s headliners No Age that the crowd gets really excited. Their simple drum and guitar combination is about as far from the White Stripes as limitations allow. The seemingly poor quality sound only adds to the effect of a band so scuzzy they make the Jesus and Mary Chain sound like they’d been playing acoustic guitar all this time.
From about halfway through the set, the stage is near permanently invaded by a group of extremely earnest fans. Though No Age’s songs aren’t always the most memorable, as a live act, their combination of intelligence and vigour has the ability to release the inner mosher of even the nerdiest, most skinny-wristed, curly-haired, four-eyed, socially awkward young gentlemen. And really, that’s what rock and roll’s all about: making the uncool cool, or at least seem cool, or at least feel cool, at least forget that they’re uncool because for that brief moment, nothing but the music matters.
