Diagram Of The Heart
XOYO, London
17/11/2010

They have the quasi-military chic going on. They have – almost absurdly for a band that were born as recently as this summer – an obsessively-to-the-point-of-alarm word-perfect and ruinously glamorous following. Their debut gig as headliners is happening right here in arguably the trendiest new venue in London’s trendy East London. Is it time for a revival of the post-Libertines brouhaha already? If it is, nobody seems, appearances notwithstanding, to have told Diagram Of The Heart. Instead, they’ve set themselves up as the answer to an excellent question that we haven’t thought to ask for quite some time now: namely, what would Britpop have been like if it was ‘The Great Escape’ rather than ‘Morning Glory’ that had sold four million?

Not, mind you, that these Diagram brothers are trading in straightforward Blur-iness. Instead, they’ve gone for the sort of artsy awkwardness that nonetheless packs the potent pop punch of, say, a ‘Common People’ or a ‘Wide Open Space’ with a clipped sartorial bent that sees them looking like nothing so much as a modern take on Menswear (although keyboardist and keystone Ant bears more of a resemblance to Paul Hartnoll, and welcomely carries some of the attendant technoid suss with him). And what a restless rummage they’re having through the leftfield box of delights, pillaging sources as diverse as The Stranglers’ ‘Skin Deep’ (which echoes darkly through ‘Skeletons’) and 4 Non Blondes’ ‘What’s Up?’ (a powerfully perverse influence on the brilliant ‘House Of Gold’) with a cackling, pseudo-hypnagogic glee, and propelling Kye’s swaggering bendy vocals aloft until he ends up having to clamber atop the bar for the insouciant fondle of the anthem buttons that is ‘Dead Famous’.

Alright, so we may be going through an age where it’s actually astonishing to watch a combo combining counter-cultural trappings with commercial trimmings to quite this extent, but that just makes this even more the time for such heroics…

Iain Moffat