Lily Allen

Perhaps the point here is the overwhelming lack of passion? Perhaps what I’m mistaking for the stage presence of five propped-upright corpses is the sort of glacial cool that warm-blooded types like me just aren’t meant to understand, let alone to enjoy? Perhaps the standstill front rows are dancing wildly inside, but New Young Pony Club fans don’t do physical exertion? Perhaps that has something to do with their singer Tahita Bulmer’s broken-robot arm-swingin’, her stuttered struts and awkward angling of her spine? That’s no dance style I’ve seen before, at least not outside of Futurama. She looks like she should be in pain half the time, but not once does the façade slip: no smiles, no heart, no soul. These people are dead inside, as hollow as the empty cans littering the venue floor.

It’s appropriate, really, that the band’s best-known song – certainly the only one heard more than once by these ears prior to attending tonight’s Lily Allen support performance – was used in an advertisement for Intel processors: ‘Ice Cream’, despite its sweet ‘n’ gooey promise, is a sexless feel-nothing whitewash of tsk-tsk GET OFF THE HI-HAT drums and bored-to-tears keys; the male forty-per-cent on stage this evening, four- and six-stringers slung about their torsos, look absolutely out of place as pony-tailed keyboard player Lou overpowers their work with washes of synthesized blandness.

The other songs aired tonight really fare no better, and are best categorised as forgettable. Granted, the Astoria stage is hardly the place for positive first impressions to breed, but it’s unlikely NYPC would have won over these senses if they were playing to an audience of one in his own living room. The five-piece go through the motions, offering nothing in the way of charm, nothing to set the ensemble apart from so many other well dressed but creatively stagnant acts loitering the capital’s much-smaller venues with utmost regularity. That they’ve managed to rise above the flock must only mean one thing: I’m in the wrong and have no business in this business.

If you cut them open they’d only bleed a shower of sparks, no doubt, and more life – more fucking fire and fervour and feeling – can be found inside any paving slab you might pass over while leaving the next NYPC show early. That said, though, don’t expect them to be playing a venue near you soon, as surely this genuinely style-over-substance approach to modern music-making can only exist successfully within the circle of the M25.