Girls

Hesitance is rarely considered a virtue, but when you've been drunkenly dragged around the block as much as I have, you soon learn not to fall in love too easy. You learn that a great song does not a hit summer album make and that a well received record does not mean that you've got a band of the year on your hands. But not every band HAS to be the best of the best because sometimes - just sometimes - better than the rest is enough. Not every band has to save your life and untangle your knotted heartstrings.

So, with my hype gripes filed away in my manbag, a pair of bald(ing) guys take to the stage, followed by a pair of long greasy-haired fashionably-in-touch-with-their-lady-side dudes. The slow, graceful, stoned strum of a geetar kicks things off and Girls whisk us into some netherworld where J. Spaceman and Brian Wilson sit on a sunrise-soaked stoop. Sixties film grain abounds. The sun-kissed/burnt 'Summertime' is slowed much more so than on the album (the annoyingly titled: Album - although not as annoying as it is to Google for the band!), almost as if they think London needs to chillax a little. It's as if they wanna slow down the earth's churn and spread some peace-and-fucking-love, man.

It doesn't take long for them to drop recent single 'Lust for Life' - an aloof lo-fi jangle-pop song that somehow out-Strokes The Strokes but at the same time rubs a garageband grit in your ears and invokes baaaaad memories of all those piss-poor New Rock Revolutionaries of not-so-long-ago. It's pretty much this track, which opens the album, which led me to file Girls in the box marked 'whatever'. Add to that the vocals, that somehow manage to muddle Burt Bacharach's croon with Lou Reed's drawl (although at times it's Lou's croon too). But until tonight I hadn't realised that they have that Marmite magic of Bright Eyes' playfully detuned pained outpourings, and it's that which has me almost understanding why they're getting so much love from the influential corners of the indie-rock fraternity.

Doubts are cast aside when they play 'Hellhole Ratrace', easily one of my alternate-reality hits of the year. It's a song that knows about the morning after, still awake from the night before, when the sun slices through a gap in the curtain and dust spins in its heavenly beam. Oh yes, this is seeing deer, in a forest, at sunrise and then walking through a town center when there's no-one else around. It's a song with grass-stained knees and straw in its hair. It's everything a gently-pulsating psychedelic romp should be, and more.

Having said this, something still isn't working. Perhaps it's The Lemonheadsy noizier third of the set, the part that really divides the crowd (I know this because seemingly half of 'em are Twittering about the gig), it's all a bit claustrophobic sprawl by numbers for me, lacking any of the drug-devoured, broken-hearted wonder that first portion of the set feels gleefully bruised by. Yet, people seem to be loving the rockpools of dizzying guitar stabbing and rapid fire drums.

Maybe I shouldn't be so reticent because caution is the dullest thing in the world and, especially with bands'n'gigs'n'things, it'll stop you from ever feeling a true sense of awe. On the other hand, tonight cynicism may have been ass-whipped by a song but, although that's part of the recipe, that does not an incredible gig make. Girls are easy to fall in love with, I'm just not sure I want them around all the time. But that's not to say I don't want them at all.

Photo by David Emery, click here for the full set