Mabel Love
Queen’s Social Club, Sheffield
23/04/2011
 
This summer, Sheffield’s Mabel Love have got an opportunity that most ambitious young bands would sell their own mothers for. They’ve been invited to support Arctic Monkeys at their hometown shows in June. Mabel Love‘s performance in front of the 10,000-strong audience could make or break them. Tonight though, they have smaller fish to fry. As a band who’ve played less than ten shows in Sheffield, this – their biggest yet – must seem just as daunting as their impending stadium visits.
 
And the nerves show. They hurry through their headline slot in just 25 minutes, too cautiously for it to really define who they are. At their most gloomy and distinctive, frontman Richard Rice sings in dramatic harmony with his bandmates, as George Moran’s Interpol-indebted bass rumbles and Dan Whitehouse’s lead guitar shrieks and pierces. This is what makes the brilliant slow build of ‘Socks’ so tense and exhilarating. But the climax doesn’t come with the crunch you’d expect and the promise of a furious, noisy onslaught goes unfulfilled. Mabel Love are often tightly melodic and moodily atmospheric, which is great. But when you want them to blow up a speaker stack or corrupt the city’s youth through the power of R.O.C.K., they don’t quite deliver.
 
On record, Mabel Love have cultivated a dark persona, wearing the introverted influence of isolated icons like Nick Cave and Ian McCulloch on the sleeves of their trenchcoats. Tonight though, the band don’t show the same “take us or leave us” attitude. They seem too eager to please and don’t show enough confidence to take the crowd out of its comfort zone. Fortunately, they have songs strong enough to almost guarantee that, with a bit more experience, they’ll outgrow their hesitance and really make their mark. Let’s hope they manage it by June.
 
Robert Cooke