Tubelord 
Borderline, London
22/02/2010

There’s something terrifically theatrical about any band who end a set with exactly the same lyrics they began it with, and, while Tubelord might not be stagey per se, there’s a rather mesmerising and ultimately rewarding quality to their meticulousness. Unusually, drummer David Catmur – a man with both overwhelmingly compelling conviction and good looks – finds himself in the position of being a cracking ringmaster via his sterling co-vocals, time-shifting alchemy, and quite literal cheerleading. But the rest of the troops themselves are anything but slacking.

Frontman Jo Prendergast, for instance, is a blond blur of enthusiastic urgency; his voice roaring with the righteous rasp of a very young Grant Nicholas and his riffs effervescing with the restlessness and focus of a newly qualified sniffer dog. And, thrillingly, the recent recruits appear to have settled in something splendid too; bass boy Tom Coulson-Smith switching between elegance and excitability at a nigh-on frighteningly fluid rate and the potentially style-changing synth-wielding addition Jamie (no surname, mind – how perversely and fantastically pop!) brings an even broader richness to the tricksiest of tapestries.

And, make no mistake, the ‘Lord might trade in tunes aplenty – given how many of the audience here appear to know the entire lyric sheet from last year’s superb ‘Our First American Friends’, accusations of unapproachable abstruseness would be wholly misplaced – but, to their credit, they’re happy to assume that the listenership can cope with whatever demands they might make. So we get songs of wild mathematical ambition, we get screaming about dinosaurs (surely a bonus that any number of bands would benefit from), and we get elliptical, exploratory wonders like ‘Night Of The Pencils’, all done with a near-peerless combustibility that renders Tubelord a very striking experience indeed.

Iain Moffat