Music Blogs

It's apt that a band like The Big Pink should arrive now, at the dying end of a British indie rock decade. Looking back, it's easy to find many of the noises British guitars have made these last ten years in those the London quartet make tonight. There, in the opening squall of "Too Young To Love", are the leather-clad punkisms of London's post-Strokes mob, Kasabian's stadium-crushing anthemics, the beer tears of Glasvegas.

But there are other, less behemoth poisons at work here - the splattering, drum machine chaos of Ulterior, for instance, and the horizon-chasing blasts of F*ck Buttons. The Big Pink's recent emergence is so apt because they look to weld that zeitgeist-y, fashion pages image to a sound that has more in kind with the behemoths, even if there are fits of subterranean noise amid their strident FM dirge. They are, in effect, a pop band who seem intent on knotting together the loose ends of that dying decade: sincerity and pretence, super-fan and fashionista, new noise, trad pop.

Tonight the difficulties and rewards of such scene-straddling are paraded in front of an oversold Camden Underworld. The hoary old venue, reeking of stale beer and fads, heaves with expectant bodies as The Big Pink transpire beneath bursting spot-bulbs to clatter into the aforementioned "Too Young To Love". Remove the odd teenage scream and it sounds more or less like it does on record, which is no bad thing - this year's debut "A Brief History Of Love" showcased the avant-noise background of songwriting duo Robbie Furze and Milo Cordell, injecting doses of underground air into what is essentially chart rock music.

Tonight though that noise is relegated to the background, denied the right to vie with the hooks on which The Big Pink's colossal choruses hang. So the pop wins out, easily - and that's a tragic thing. Why? Because the songs need that noise and the contrast it provides. Without that veneer it feels too easy - "Dominos"' chorus, big enough for Absolute Radio and Xbox 360 ads, is just too potent, too grand, too obvious when it arrives at set's end.

That said, there are moments when the tender and the brash are allowed to compete and it's then that the highlights arrive: "Crystal Visions" jaw-dropping in its ghoulish surge, April single "Velvet" still their best song, a cover of Otis Redding's "These Arms Of Mine" (obviously) louder than the original. They delight, but these stand-out moments only encourage the suspicion that The Big Pink would do well to re-prioritise their influences. They have, after all, a whole decade to choose from. Surely it wasn't all this potent, this grand, this obvious?

by Kev Kharas