Metronomy
Trinity Centre, Bristol
28/09/2011

Much like internet dial up and miaow miaow, the glow-stick-waving arsery of nu-rave has been reduced to relic-of-our-time novelty status. The Klaxons? CSS? Does it Offend You, Yeah?? They’ve all moved on. Indeed, this neon-garbed, dance-bastardising craze belongs in a museum, displayed next to the noisier and more hirsute, but no less adolescent or faddish, nu-metal.

Joe Mount and Metronomy have somehow survived the vicissitudes of our shallow times. They’ve re-aligned their act, adding human beat-keeping courtesy of Anna Prior and a new slap-happy bassist in career DJ Gbenga Adelekan. They’ve re-sculpted their sound too. Their Devon-centric ‘The English Riviera’ wafted gloriously across the airwaves all summer with a shimmering lounge-funk ease that earned them a Mercury Prize nomination. And tonight, amid the gritty, beach-heat throb inside the Trinity Centre, these sultry, bittersweet sketches of seaside resorts elevate them out of their bloopy, plink-plonk malaise.

They hang loose with opener ‘We Broke Free’, with its unbuttoned groove and slashes of gilded guitar. All the Kraftwerk hand gesturing and synchronised flashing chest patches remain from their early days, but they’ve returned with an expansive approach to composition, augmented by Adelekan’s snaking bass lines and the band’s gliding four-way harmonies. The ice cream-melting bounce of ‘The Bay’ is harder edged in the flesh, while ‘The Look’, with its carousel of waltzing synth, is cool, dainty and danceable. Naturally, they cast their lines back and hook out material from ‘Pip Paine’ and ‘Nights Out’. In doing so, however, especially on the lurching post-punk of ‘You Could Have Me’, they taint the beatific, mellifluous grooves displayed in the new material.
Deserved Mercury nominees, it will be interesting to see to what creative depths Metronomy will plunge next.

Jamie Skey