Lyrebirds
London Barfly
05/05/2010

Blood runs through their veins, that’s where the similarity, er, begins… You know, given that the Barfly’s boards have been trodden at an almost identical stage, career-wise, by Editors, and, come to think of it, by Interpol too, there’s a very real risk that we could find ourselves watching this lot and thinking “You, sirs, are no [insert name of beautifully doomy band of choice here]”, so it’s to Lyrebirds’ eternal credit that it’s a trap they fail fairly finely to fly into.

It helps, of course, that in Adam Day they’ve got a frontman that can turn effortlessly in an instant from intimidating insouciance to everymanish inclusivity in a fashion that many of the landfill legions  made the mistake of thinking they’d mastered, yet for all his mainstream-friendly credentials, his voice is far lower-registered and more luxuriant than initial impressions’d suggest and blessed at times with the messianic confrontational edge of, say, Ian McCulloch. It also doesn’t hurt that this is a collection of truly colossal performances: frankly, there’s no end to the metaphorical dry ice they send billowing across the stage from the word go, and, while this may only be a dual-guitared assault, it feels of sufficient scale to clatter through the venue’s walls and scamper up the street to the Roundhouse, and that’s just for starters.

Most importantly, though, they’re already at the point of having a seemingly limitless supply of songs pointed with surgical precision at the more incongruously dark corners of the indie dancefloor. Their finale ‘Catalyst’ has an almost-lysergic lustre , while ‘Human Symphony’, perhaps their standout, is an air-punching fiesta of chimes and chaos, and current single ‘Closer’ is simultaneously disconnected and hook-filled. They’re far past the stage of winging it, and, really, you’d get rubbish odds against them taking off something shocking in their own right any day now.

Iain Moffat