The Big Pink
Electric Ballroom, London
22/10/2009

Theeeeeeeeey’re coming up, so you’d better get the party started… Actually, The Big Pink might well be up-and-coming – just this week, after all, they’ve become the first new band on 4AD to go top forty since, unbelievably, The Breeders – but they’re really much more of a comedown-happy affair. Thankfully, though, the preceding appearance of We Fell To Earth, all Lost Boys dusky bombast and Spacemen 3 portentous blur, has left us thoroughly primed for what proves to be, in essence, the jagged full stop to the nu-rave dream. Wonderfully, this manifests itself in an icy display of fractured fuzz, tremulously wayfaring keyboard runs and, frequently vocals that wrap their glamorous sentiments in a standoffish leather jacket. Sure, they might share certain characteristics with some of the critical favourites of the age (there’s a definite doffing of the cap at times to both Glasvegas and the new’n'improved Horrors, for instance), but here they cut some of the unlikeliest breakthrough figures we’ve seen in a while.

Still, above and beyond the stylistics delights of the proceedings as a whole, where the Pink pair really excel is in fact on what ought to be the smaller scale of their individual songs. We say smaller scale, mind, but, really, there’s nothing at all diminutive about them in full flight: ‘Velvet’, perhaps a little predictably, scores an early victory by dint of its unhealthy abundance of both pathos and sandblasting, while, later, ‘Too Young To Love’ will weave a swirling swoon that nestles its way into the sublime, and, inevitably, ‘Dominos’, well, brings the house down, its unambiguous anthemic qualities and post-MGMT frisson making for a hard and heady brew. Alright, so it’s not all as nuanced or as lurid as we might’ve liked, but there’s an irresistibility to their rise regardless, not to mention only the rosiest of possibilities…

Iain Moffat