Two Door Cinema Club
The Garage, London
01/03/2010

They’re smart! They’re art! They’ll probably chart! Needless to say, in an era in which the upper hand has fallen, where creative commercialism is concerned, to performers whose familiarity with the littler venues of the land is minimal at best, this renders Two Door Cinema Club as something of an oasis, or, more pertinently, something of a Franz Ferdinand. Not, of course, that they’re content to commit themselves strictly to tribute territory, but the parallels with the Kapranos crew are welcomely visible throughout.

For one thing, there’s a glamorous, devil-may-care impatience to their tunes – so much so that it was perhaps inevitable we’d need to be treated to a new track tonight (the excellent ‘Kids’) since ‘Tourist History’, plugged here with an unexpected and endearing coyness, blasts by in barely half an hour under its own juggernauty steam. Not to mention the outfit’s penchant for flirting with the very foundations of indie flooring galore and more sharpness than a glossy-cheekboned E4 drama on knife crime. Moreover, for a band so seemingly primed to be autograph-hunted, they’re anything but lacking in soundly-formed signatures. There’s a copious degree of guitar, for instance, that whinnies and gallops like a lithe-but-startled thoroughbred taunted by fireworks (‘Come Back Home”s a particular sparkler on this front), while there’s a gang-ish enthusiasm to the shared vocals that lends them a distinctly affable air.

Plus, Two Door Cinema Club’s electronic bolstering ensures that they enjoy the deftest of dances with Delphic during ‘Do You Want It All?’, and the bold-but-bookish delivery of Alex Trimble is wholly in the spirit of an age where the keys to number one can even be pawed at by the Owl Cities of the world. Admittedly, stylishness and stagecraft are clearly still next on the priority list, but the amount they’ve got going for them even as a work in progress simply renders them all the more entrancing.

Iain Moffat