Book Harrison

The last time we saw Dead! Dead! Dead! here they strolled onstage to the sound of an orchestra tuning up, burst into action after cut-up movie dialogue and occasionally stopped to let a music box play to its heart’s content. And what have they now? A smoke machine. A. Smoke. Machine. Is the gap between art and pomp really that short nowadays?

Well apparently not, as thankfully the dapper attire, the organ that sounds like it’s on loan from Fischer Price and guitars imitating tigers on the prowl are still here. Like the Coopers befriending one of the Buckleys, they’ve got songs stuffed full of poignancy and rage – a bit like the sound of Chris Martin’s fist lunging at one of the paparazzi. ‘For Every Heart (There Is A Knife)’ goes from a wail to a sneer to a scream like any song that thinks it’s creepy should, and before the last track the main vocalists perks in a Standard English tone “Let’s give it some balls”, like he’s just sauntered out of Cambridge having failed in Mad Fer It studies. Marvellous - just a shame they were on first.

Remember in science lessons at school they used to have those evolutionary charts that show the development from primate to Homo Sapien? Well, The Bullycats' stage set up is a bit like that, but instead of going from monkey to man goes from Tommy Vance’s (musical) wet dream hunched over a guitar to a member of The Coral. As for the songs, though, they veer between Jane’s Addiction-style rock, ’Sweet Home Alabama’-style blues-rock, and one tune uses an almost identikit riff of that from ’Kevin Carter’ by the Manics but explodes into bigger rock riffery soon after. That’s right, they ROCK.

The last time we saw Alaskan Pipeline they were on a bill below the aforementioned Dead!…, and it’s not difficult to see why they’re rising in popularity. If you’re a devout follower of indie-schmindie introversion then you doubtless would have heard bands like them before. You know the sort of thing - Elbow, Starsailor, Feeder’s latest album etc. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not irresistible. The fretwork is implausibly high, the atmosphere created is ethereal, the vocals are soaring and the songs are smouldering like the increasingly sporadic smoke machine would suggest. Don’t be surprised if you hear much more of them.

Londoners Book Harrison don’t have a singer as high-pitched as the previous bands but the first track they play, where the vocalist does a Cedric Bixler-esque delivery, is a more-than-worthy substitute for pocket-grabbing squeals. Add that to the guitars that imitate Hundred Reasons and the bass that is so funky an audience member asks the drummer where he left his cowbell, then they’re promising from the off. A bit disappointing, therefore, that most of the other songs are a bit, for want of a better phrase, “pub-emo”, like the hard and straightforward parts of, say, Biffy Clyro. It’s early days yet, and we can tell they’ve got it in them, but maybe Book Harrison could do with a few more redeeming features before their relative obscurity becomes endangered.