Grammatics

The odds seem to be stacked against Grammatics right now. Shortly before Christmas they lost their original cellist, and the first shows with a new line-up (recent recruit Emilia Ergin has barely practised with the band) are in support of the revitalised, and still pretty massive, Futureheads on a high-profile national jaunt. Oh, and vocalist Owen Brinley has pretty much lost his voice...

Pressure? Perhaps, but it doesn’t show in the performance. Their five-song set on this rainy Friday evening is utterly beguiling, building from sold-out Dance To The Radio debut single ‘Shadow Committee’ - all crunchy, cathartic guitars and portentous, paranoid lyrics - into the sugar sweet emo-pop rush of ‘The Vague Archive’, and topped off by new set closer ‘Relentless Fours’, the glorious, noisy culmination of their endeavours which sees Brinley on the ground wrenching feedback out of his amp. He’s not kidding when he sings_ “everyone loves a breakdown”_ at the end of the first verse.

Before that, though, there’s ‘Broken Wing’, a song that made its way into this writer’s top ten list for 2007. Sure, they’ve performed it better than they do tonight but the moment Brinley’s guitar squeals into life after a deliberately laboured build-up still makes the hairs stand firmly on end. And you don’t need to know these tunes beforehand to appreciate their qualities. That, of course, is the mark of good songwriting.

Sure, Grammatics will polarise opinion and they’re not to everyone’s tastes, but that’s what a good band should be like. As ridiculous as it might seem to the converted, there are some people who don’t understand why Radiohead are widely regarded as the best, most forward-thinking British band around. It would be foolish and unfair on Grammatics to make that comparison, but given the necessary time to develop it's not entirely unfeasible that they could go on to produce a record along such grandiose lines as OK Computer or The Bends.

Though they have no particular regard for what daytime FM listeners might want to listen to (see glorious six-minute epic ‘Polar Swelling’), they’ve still got that knack of writing memorable tunes – even if the part you remember is a delay-riddled guitar riff or a thunderous drum roll rather than a festival-friendly chorus – that make feet shuffle. You can tell they’ve listened to The Faint or !!! as much as they have Cursive, for instance. Though those reference points might well be lost on the majority of this Student’s Union, the applause and nods of approval tonight tell their own story.

They might well be a band in transition, but whatever Grammatics choose to evolve into over the next few months promises to be nothing if not compulsive listening for fans of ambitious, leftfield pop.