The Music

I got a phenomenal amount of ridicule for turning up to this gig tonight. My friends were only too quick to point out that The Music are shit and that I was an idiot for going to see them. Fuck that. Five minutes into the band's set and there's nowhere I'd rather be. This isn't the kind of gig where you turn up and be seen to be seen, stand and watch (...the bar), and bask in the smug glow of knowing that purporting to like this band makes you Cool. This crowd is crammed-together, adrenaline-soaked, twitching as they wait for every white knuckle rhythm and teasing, cyclical guitar line to connect, detonate and shower them with sonic debris. This is how it should be. The Academy is full, the lights are flailing, four thousand or so people are pulsing to one rhythm, spinning in all directions. Up onstage, the frontman of The Music is doing the same.

The Music bleed, breathe and sweat kinetic energy. This is why everyone is bouncing off each other; it's exhilarating. From start to finish, the pace is breakneck. Singer Robert Harvey is as high as the crowd, lurching and whirling around the stage, his heady, distinctive vocals standing up to scrutiny, pinging off every surface in the building.

And you get something that you get with surprisingly few bands - you get a connection. You know exactly what they're thinking. Craning your neck over the height of the crowd, you look at them up there, and the first thought that comes to mind is how fucking brilliant it must be to be up on that stage at this precise moment, hurtling around with little regard for what you look like, buried neck-deep in frenzied machine-gun beats and tangled Led Zep guitar fuzz. Harvey's no rockstar; he's not cool, he's not pretty, he certainly doesn't dress well. But this isn't about photogenic potential; his exuberance holds the band's performance together, and filters down to the heaving crowd beneath him, whirling around in a similar fashion. By the time the undulating, fizzing 'Take The Long Road and Walk It' explodes, they're putty in his hands, utterly submerged in the rhythm as the song gathers pace. Despite its shameless retro pillaging of its musical ancestry, it sounds relentlessly, deliciously fresh and optimistic.

This is dance and rock merged perfectly; for a guitar band, they manage remarkably well to capture the addictive abandonment of self that dance culture is famed for; the kids here tonight ricochet around like pinballs in their own orbit, eyes fused shut, shoulders heaving and jerking, hands forming playshapes above their heads. No-one cares what they look like or where they end up. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.