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You'll have to excuse us, but we're having a bit of
A Moment. Can you give us five? The adrenaline-jab rock-blister
night-train joy-ride 'Whatever Happened To My Rock 'N'
Roll (Punk Song)' has just careered off the rails, screeching
like a banshee in worn leather slacks, smashing apart
anything in its path and then just fucking off as swiftly
and as enigmatically as it came, leaving us to smolder
helplessly in the white hot wreckage. Without so much
as a goodbye or even a gracious wink. And damn - the
sadomasochist in us cries - it feels good. Hell and
indeed yeah!
 See,
they fool you into thinking you know them and their
predictabilities, ambling along being generally mysterious,
dark and wonderful, becoming the living embodiment of
a stereotype, all the while creeping up on you from
angles you forgot you had, caressing your nerve endings
and then - BLAM! - they crowbar open your heart with
a bass-line nail bomb, break, enter and blow your tiny
little mind. Jesus, now where's my cigarettes.
And that's not just the smell of smoke, leather and
overpriced stale beer you notice lingering in the air,
oh no. That ain't just any old smell. That's the grubby
stench of genuine unavoidable greatness there you know.
This show was originally penciled in for next door's
pokey pocket sized LA2, and while shoehorning them into
there may have laid claim to gig of the century barely
two years in, no doubt, even the Astoria has trouble
containing the buzz, the electricity, the burgeoning
base sonics and howling love being thrown right back
at 'em. Whether you reckon they're ripping off the Jesus
& Mary Chain, instigating an unwanted shoe-gazing revival
or jumping on a roughly banged-together bandwagon (all,
incidentally, untrue - just to clear that up), spend
80 divine minutes in their company and then try your
arguments again, why dontcha!?
Because borrow from The Jesus & Mary chain they might
do (the slumped rhythms, the aspiring drawl, the melody
crushed hard up against the darkness), as they do early
Verve (a gritty disillusioned sprawling psychedelia),
Spiritualized, Spaceman 3 and My Bloody Valentine (blissed
out confession under the influence), but ram that into
a lock-in with the Dandy Warhols, disenchanted Americana
and some bad drugs and you can't help but be shocked
rigid with inspiration. In the flesh you've never seen
anything more absolutely utterly absorbingly real.
Unlike many of today's micro-processing, uber-efficient
stringently checked and sterile rock androids, this
is guaranteed machinery from yesteryear that you can
hear clunking into gear through a wonderfully stretched
'Red Eyes & Tears' and sweaty though reserved 'Love
Burns', but when the cogs really reach speed during
'White Palms', Peter Hayes and Robert Turner's grumbled
vocals continuously nudging up against, holding and
outdoing each other, the authenticity of the whole package
just snares your soul and reels you in. Finishing with
an extended estate version of album closer 'Salvation',
featuring all of support act The Vue on percussion,
harmonica, etc, it's like Beck and Jason Pierce at 10
paces in a lava storm and life, it seems, couldn't get
any better. Whatever happened to our rock 'n' roll?
Shame we had to wait for them to tell us themselves.
James Berry for Crud Magazine 2002© 
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