Mar 06 2010 11:00 am, JJ Dunning
The Fly Presents…
North Atlantic Oscillation/The Neat
Camden Barfly, London
04/03/2010
Fuck you 2010. So far, what exactly have you turned up? Hmm? Yet more synth-pop and a new Courteeners album? Pathetic. And you’ve killed 6Music as well. You’re rubbish. We’re leaving...
Hang on a minute, what’s this?
Onstage before us are The Neat. A furious foursome from Hull, a bleak city stuffed with abbatoirs, rattling out angular buzzsaw Buzzcockisms to a half-empty Barfly like it was Brixton Academy.
Unquestionably, they’re the finest new guitar band we’ve seen in an age, but as their six-song set hurtles by, through the juddering heart attack of ‘In Youth Is Pleasure’ and the cryptic rattle of ‘Fruits’, they’re nothing short of a revelation. Banter is reassuringly scarce (“We’re from Hull” is about the extent of it), t-shirts are reassuringly cool (woodpeckers and paint splats), and the lyrics that bark over the rancour don’t so much dissect popular culture as bash it into bits with a big stick. Clearly, the new post-punk intelligentsia are from the East Riding. Who knew?
By comparison, the quiet/loud dronescapes of North Atlantic Oscillation are a little anaemic. Gone is the menace and lingering, lush urgency of their excellent debut ‘Grappling Hooks’, instead, relying heavily on a Mac, the trio struggle to keep the pace up. Which is a shame, because when they do break from the murmur – on the sizeably grumpy ‘Hollywood Has Ended’ – they are as good as we’d hoped. Second best on the night? Well, yeah, but still good enough to convince us of something much more important.
This decade might not be so bad after all.
JJ Dunning
