Lissy Trullie
Hoxton Bar & Grill, London
31/03/2009 

Lissy Trullie has been onstage for two minutes and she’s already torn Hoxton’s cool credentials to shreds; dressed in a leather jacket and mini skirt, white Telecaster hiked up to just below her shoulders and a strawberry blonde fringe effortlessly flopping over her forehead, the New York twiglet oozes the sort of Manhattan cool that’d have Agy feeling positively Matalan. That the two minutes she’s spent onstage have been spent tuning a guitar in silence matters not, especially when she starts playing and shows off some of the most indelibly seductive garage-pop we’ll hear all year.

Tonight’s set, little under thirty minutes long, sees Trullie and her band unveil one devastatingly simple pop song after another; ‘She Said’ resembles Ladyhawke swapping the synth for staccato guitar jangles – indeed, Lissy pilfers the same era of eighties bubblegum pop as Pip Brown -, ‘Self Taught Learner’ sounds likes The Bangles reworking Pixies’ ‘Hey’ and ‘Money’, which Lissy declares is renamed ‘Pounds’ for the night, is one of those oxymoronic ditties that sounds throwaway but manages to lodge itself between your brain and your ear when you try to discard it.

At different times tonight, Lissy Trullie sounds like a garage-pop Pretenders (closer and highlight ‘Boy Boy’), a Patti Smith without the huge chip of that face on her shoulder. There’s even times where we’re reminded of the buoyant scuzz-rock that first album Razorlight, and pre-Bono-complex Johnny Borrell, excelled in. It’s cocky and effortlessly cool – expect her to take the big things coming her way in her stride…

Niall Doherty