Mar 22 2009 8:27 pm, Pic: Adam Walton
The Boy
Telfords Warehouse, Chester
Some of us lost faith in the power of guitar-driven music to make interesting yet commercial music a long time ago.
After all, we endured a long line of dullards and false prophets. TheKooksScoutingForGirlsTheKillers and their brethren should, if all of this finger-crossing works, go the same way as the store their music is most analogous to: MFI.
We're here to see a Woolworths soul called The Boy.
Actually, we're here to promote the gig, but that isn't going to stop us from reviewing it. When you find the image of Jesus in your tea leaves, you have to go show your neighbours.
The Boy is
The Boy and his backing band wander on to the stage like a bunch of electricians looking for a fusebox.
They look wonderfully anachronistic in this age of preening, over-stylized scene bands. These are tradesmen. Their trade is songs. They have their City and Guilds, and then some, in arrangement and embellishment. There is nothing workmanlike about how they play.
The opening song, 'Blood of Man', it is fair to say, has all of the mojo, the drive, the guts, the life and the holy spirit The Kooks do not have. Which is an awful lot of all of those things.
Despite a long-standing love affair with musics that wear many different hats, we still do not have a sufficient musical vocabulary to describe this.
Since white men nicked the blues off the black man, each successive generation has papered over the raw spirit, adding a layer of artifice here, a bit of knowing there, a veneer of clever-dickery all over the bloody place. But The Boy harks back to that time when Elvis, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams et al were working music at the spiritual coalface.
Yet it sounds nothing like any of those artists.
It might remind you, fleetingly, of the Flaming Lips, or Beck, because it has that same sense of wonder about the possibilities inherent within creating music. But where Flaming Lips and Beck, brilliant as they are, are sometimes guilty of emotional impotence, The Boy's songs are elemental and raw. Someone decided, somewhere along the line, that we shouldn't write about love. The Boy's songs are all about love. Even the ones that aren't are suffused by that sweet pain, hope, fear and aliveness that comes with new love.
When the harmonies literally burst from the speakers it's quite unlike anything we've ever heard. And we heard Brian Wilson do Pet Sounds in
Songs that sound like singles that are imminently going to start soundtracking people's lives arrive like buses we'd forgotten we were waiting for.
We get ukuleles. And songs about Squirrels on Cannonballs -- not literally, but there is a whole other level of metaphorical genius at play, here.
We do, for the sake of our Britishness, note a few negatives. The Boy himself, while commanding the songs with a voice that rings clearly through every inch of the venue, has a tendency to turn his back to us. But this is akin to spending the night with Angelina Jolie and complaining that she's left lipstick marks all over our Y-Fronts. Also, the set loses a little momentum in the run up the last furlong. Until the very last song, 'Hold Me Til My Brain Dies' invents a whole new colour of wow.
They leave and we want more.
We still want more three days later.
We’re sorry if we sound hyperbolic. We’re sorry if we sound evangelical. We can’t help it. You’ll see.
Adam Walton
