Feb 28 2008 12:40 pm,
White Lies/Team Waterpolo/Semifinalists
Hoxton Bar & Grill, London
28/02/2008
If a bomb goes off during White Lies set tonight then BOOM! go the head honchos of the UK music industry – tonight’s audience is possibly the most industry-centric The Fly has ever witnessed but, contrary to A&R hype usually picking up on the steaming turd of a Boy Kill Boy here or a Jing Jang Jong there, White Lies are well deserving of the attention. Tonight might be their first London gig – in fact, they’re counting this as their first gig ever, at all - but the quartet are already a bewitching, exhilarating force to be reckoned with. The likes of ‘Fairground’ and ‘Death’ sound like The Killers if they’d honed in on the expansive glum of Joy Division rather than the camped-up histrionics of New Order. White Lies’ influences are obvious but ultimately irrelevant, they make funereal neo-classics that are entirely their own – a fact that’s evident by the puddles of saliva left on the floor after they’ve finished.
Team Waterpolo, taking to the stage an hour later, are a different proposition entirely though. As in, they’re rubbish. If recent single ‘Letting Go’ suggested that they could’ve been an 80s pop Franz Ferdinand, then tonight they’re more like a crap Automatic. And that is after taking into account that The Automatic are a crap Automatic. They’re dressed like students in their fat older brother’s clothes and each song arrives with a tinny, processed, personality-free polish. The band equivalent of pressing the Indie-rock Demo button on a Casio keyboard.
Semifinalists have personality in spades though – just trying to follow Ferry Gouw round the stage with your eyes is tiring. Tonight, with Ferry’s ex-Test Icicles bandmate Dev Hynes on bass, they sound like a brilliantly ramshackle Flaming Lips, a band as creative as MGMT and as houseparty-friendly as Foals. Another reason to celebrate 2008 as the year when bands got inventive again.
Niall Doherty
