Goldrush

The first two bands tonight put on very promising shows. Both having been featured on Truck Records’ excellent compilations, both last the distance in a half hour slot. Black Nielson, with a lead singer bearded and lanky, play as chaotically and roughly as they look, often using the traditional rock ‘Wall of Sound’ as a tool for getting this (very large and chatty) audience’s attention. Vera Cruz, while slightly softer, add to all this. Friday Night Rock’n’Roll is certainly in the grasp of two bands that otherwise are pretty understated. Yet, both groups do not quite capture the subtle modernity and edge of the main event:

Goldrush, an indie/country/rock hybrid from Oxford, are playing new material, and what is fascinating as the gig unfolds (for Goldrush are one of those bands whose style very much reflects a gently unweaving Ancient Greek Homeresque poem, such is their aching eye- or ear, I suppose for detail, and the value of musical texture), seeing the band’s attitude to their old material. The songs you will most likely have heard are _'Don’t Bring Me Down', 'Same Picture', 'Wide Open Sky' and 'Pioneers'_. The first two are unassuming, delicate and sweet, in the manner of ‘typical’ Goldrush. ‘Wide Open Sky,’ by a small margin the ‘anthem’ of Goldrush’s career thus far is played with a real bombast, something which I find a little unnerving. The lead singer Robin has a tendency to smile with a contented embarrassment after every round of applause, but in this song, at the end of it he seems a little underwhelmed by it all. 'Pioneers' isn’t even played at all, despite my own hollering at the front row.

Goldrush are one step further on from when I last saw them in March. With these old songs, they could be associated with the ‘old guard’ of the indie scene. With the style-mongers at the NME trumpeting a rock revolution, it is hard to look back now at Steve Lamacq’s show, in its traditional glory days of 2001 before, where Goldrush were given a fair hearing, without being compared with Coldplay. The new songs exploit and improve upon the ‘wall of sound of the future’ style that the Doves pretty much invented on **‘The Last Broadcast:’** Shimmering, and with a gorgeous warm intensity. The last song that Goldrush play, ‘the Counting Song’ is the finest exponent of this, and will be the song, after a certain amount of being lost in the wilderness, that the band will re-earn their right to melt the hearts of the masses. I didn’t expect this gig to be as much of a statement of intent as it was.