Everything Everything
Koko, London
10/05/2010

Kitchen sink! Drama! Their name might be a homage to Underworld, but the sounds themselves are strictly those of the underground, although, far from deciding to limit their exploration to just a niche or two, Everything Everything seem to have come to the conclusion that it’s possible to squeeze the entirety of popular and even-vaguely-liked music into half an hour. Inevitably, this leads to them having a compellingly manic quality throughout; just as inevitably, however, it does mean that there are times when it’d be fair to say that that way lies madness…

Of course, they can only even engage in such an ambitious attempt because of the terrific tools at their disposal: Jonathan’s falsetto can occasionally recall a rather more restrained Hayden Thorpe, but it’s accompanied by harmonies that dart distractingly between traditional Teenage Fanclub territory and more quixotic Queenisms. And there’s unarguably a Betas-based virtuosity at play too. Where they sometimes stumble, though, is in having more ideas than they’ve quite had the chance to wholly think through.

New single ‘Schoolin”, for example, piles on the whistly wilfulness, slashed guitars, trance breakdowns and dirty dissonance with such cavalier breathlessness that it never quite overcomes its disorientation, and ‘Suffragette Suffragette’, delivered before they’ve really found their onstage feet, never quite reaches the even-saucier-Late Of The Pier heights it did as a single due to the structural unsoundness with which its crunching commences.

However, these stumbles are brilliantly buoyed by several instances of magnificently-conceived magic: ‘Photoshop Handsome’, always essentially The Smiths in a hurry as prime Sparks give chase, sounds every bit the wonder it always was, the oddly played-straight ‘Tin’ has a turbulently innocent purity to it, and, best of all, ‘MY KZ, YR BF’ sits perfectly at the fulcrum of mid-80s Scritti Politti and mid-90s Stereolab. There are times, certainly, when Everything Everything are simply too much, but they’re never less than wholly fascinating.

Iain Moffat