Instores are odd. The glare of shop lighting, the looming displays of point-of-sale puts something as transcendental as music into its blatant retail context where no matter how tight, how on–it the band are, it's hard to dispel the hard sell of this environment and invoke the magic of their sound.
No Age
Photos: Maddie Woodcock
No Age look a little bleary-eyed. And of course it being three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon they bloody well have the right to be. What’s more, the LA duo has the affable US college slacker demeanour of men who may well know a great deal of Pavement B-sides. Amidst the racks of Moshi Moshi sleeve displays this is like watching the guys from High Fidelity playing in their own shop. No Age are fine, at their most average a compendium of the best bits of an impeccable set of influences. The moments they truly excel are when the psychedelic oceanic shimmer of the guitar/drumfest merges into crystallized shapes with prime melodic slacker fuzz to create something as untouchably airborn as early Jane’s Addiction.
No Age
Next we head to Beyond Retro, which has the distinct advantage of not being a record shop and therefore feeling less like a personalized free voucher. Framed in an enclave in Cheshire Street’s slightly overpriced warehouse (go to East End Thrift Store down Whitechapel for the same stuff at a much cheaper price!), Times New Viking look like crazy kids playing in a giant dressing up cupboard. I should really discuss the music here, but I have to say that Beth Murphy is the coolest and damnest most attractive front woman I have seen in ages, a vision of cool, geeky sex with perfect hair. She leads her merry pranksters through a brittle mess of slightly cutesy shambolic discordance.
Times New Viking
Times New Viking
Finally we make it to Rough Trade East, passed some kids selling stolen bikes who tell me to get a haircut, to see Cardiff’s Los Campesinos. The exposed naiveties that occasionally grate on their debut, We are Beautiful, We are Doomed, here in a live context add up to the band’s many qualities. Los Campesinos could have never existed in another period of time. The way that out of the murk of the early part of the decade – the post rock of Godspeed and even the self pitying of a countless number of arse cleavaged Emos can mutate into something as buoyant, as upliftingly trivial/epic is, like the energy flash of Rolo Tomassi, a victory sign that kids will constantly and more often than not unselfconsciously find ways to rewire and mutate, finding life in even the drabbest of situations.
Los Campesinos
Los Campesino
