We Were Evergreen

The
Lexington,

London

19/10/2011

Despite baulking at the likes of craggy-faced crooner Johnny Hallyday or stern rockers Noir Desir, us Brits have never been averse to allowing a steady trickle of excellent French artists into our popular music canon.

While most recent Francophonic imports have been Daft Punk indebted electro-types, the latest gaggle of Gallic popsters looking to make waves this side of the channel are of a very different musical bent, and come armed with more ukuleles, home-made bunting, toy pianos and undiluted whimsy than you can conceivably shake a baguette at. Wide-eyed Parisian trio We Were Evergreen  possess such child-like wonderment and infectious joie de vivre that they could comfortably out-twee even the most gingham-clad, cupcake-making, floral dress-wearing, poetry-writing Belle and Sebastian fan you could possibly find on these shores.

You have to admire a band who write lyrics including the couplet “You and me under a tree/K.I.S.S.I.N.G.” and  references to how much they love puppies and moonboots and penguins and butterscotch without it becoming totally and utterly unbearable. In fact, the overpowering, hooray-for-everything whimsy of their whole schtick does a real disservice to quite what a wonderfully life-affirming live act they are. The three perma-smiling and, dare we say it, incredibly good-looking members of We Were Evergreen are all talented multi-instrumentalists who spend the gig playfully juggling a musical toybox featuring synths, ukes, guitars, drums, trumpets, glocks and percussion. They add assorted layers of cutesy whoops, yelps and beats with loop pedals, and aren’t afraid to indulge in an extended end-of-set brass-synth wig-out to which a resoundingly won-over

Lexington bops (‘bop’ is definitely the right verb) to.

Their real selling point, however, is their super-crisp, three-part, boy-girl harmonies which really come to the fore during a second (yes, second) encore, which sees the band impishly perform a new song acapella in the centre of the crowd. It’s all too easy to get bogged down in the search for the edgy and profound and forget that live music is, essentially, supposed to be fun, and what We Were Evergreen lack in depth of meaning, they make up for in being an utterly joyous live experience.

Francis Whittaker