Camera Obscura - Newcastle 02 Academy 2 - 21/4/09 (Gig)

It’s a dangerous thing, being on the top of your game. When you’re at the absolute peak of your powers, it can sometimes feel like a derailment is just around the corner.

It is for this reason that I went to see Camera Obscura at Newcastle Academy 2 tonight with an even mix of trepidation and anticipation. After all, they’ve managed to follow up their career highlight Let’s Get Out of This Country with the equally fantastic My Maudlin Career. The little devil on my shoulder was prodding me all day, making me wonder if they could possibly live up to it all.

Fortunately for all concerned (well, mainly me really), they managed to maintain their place on the pedestal I created for them with a night of the prettiest, purest pop known to man.

Tracyanne Campbell’s voice is one of the most important components of the way Camera Obscura sound. Her half-longing, half-bored Scotch lilt adds almost unbearable levels of emotion to the songs, and this was ramped up to the max tonight. The sparse perfomance of ‘Country Mile’ in particular, was heart wrenching.

So heart wrenching, in fact, that for a brief moment I managed to forget how ridiculously full the Academy was tonight. Each stamp on my foot and shove in the back from someone struggling to the bar on the other side of the room was a clear reminder of just how popular Camera Obscura have become.

And really, how could they not be? When you can create such beautiful and timeless pop music as they do, and can deliver it so effortlessly on a nightly basis, then people can’t help but respond.

Somehow, they keep achieving new heights. Just look My Maudlin Career’s closing track ‘Honey in the Sun’. On the record, it’s pure bliss. Joyous, and a little bit sad, the archetypal Camera Obscura song. But tonight it was that little bit more euphoric, delivered with the glee of a band who know just how good their songs are.

So much so, in fact, that even when their usually seamless playing goes a bit wonky, you can’t possibly object. A few false starts (‘Obscura moments’, apparently) don’t matter. Complaining about those would be like kicking a kitten for sneezing. Tonight was just about enjoying a band in such top form that you don‘t bat an eyelid when you get home to realise the football on telly finished 4-4.

Passion Pit - The Reeling (Single)

This time a year ago, Passion Pit were on very few people’s radars. That altered with the Chunk of Change EP, half an hour of cute, vibrant electro-pop. They even came ready-packaged with their own convenient little piece of indie mythology, that the EP was originally recorded by the band’s mainstay Michael Angelakos as a Valentine’s Day gift for his girlfriend.

After the success of the EP, and the credibility-sapping seals of approval it generated (BBC Sound of 2009, anyone?) the threat of the seemingly inevitable backlash has been drawing ever nearer.

Well, with ‘The Reeling’, the first single off their debut album (Manners, due out here on May 26th), Passion Pit haven’t given the indie community too much cause to sharpen the knives just yet.

It’s a solid effort, and a promising taster for the album. Stylistically, it’s not drastically different to the songs on the EP. All the band’s endearing characteristics are on display. The track shows the inventiveness we saw on the EP, the warm electro textures and Angelakos’ distinctive shrill vocals. It’s driven on by a harder beat than we’ve heard from them before, and the ‘oh no’ hooks create the same sense of euphoria which infuses the EP.

One minor gripe about the song is its production. Chunk of Change is by no means a lo-fi recording, but ‘The Reeling’ is definitely a good deal shinier. This time out they managed to land just the right side of over-produced, but it’s a fine line, and Passion Pit will need to be wary of falling into the trap in future.

For now though, ‘The Reeling’ will hold us just fine. It’s a strong single, which shows signs of progression. It may be a little less urgent than most of Chunk of Change, but it‘s likeability increases with each listen, and it‘s done the job of whetting our appetites for the album.

Kenickie - At the Club (Album)

So it’s early 1997. Oasis are a matter of months away from strapping Britpop to their motorbike and heaving it’s tired carcass over the metaphorical shark. Blur have already evolved their way out of the scene by indulging their Pavement fantasies on their eponymous classic. And Kenickie, with characteristically disastrous timing are about to unleash their debut album At the Club.

But we’ll disregard the inopportune timing of Lauren Laverne’s merry gang for now and concentrate on one of the best guitar pop records of the ‘90s.

Like 1977, which was released a year previously, At the Club is an album that could only have been made by teenagers. From start to finish, it’s a blast of pure youthful energy. It kicks off with ‘In Your Car’, an explosive precursor of things to come. What follows is a mix of shouty harmonies, playful pop fun, and smart-arsed soundbites.

The album calls to mind a lot of the best bands of the ‘90s. For example, the squelchy synths on Robot Song are reminiscent of the first Mansun record. What‘s kept At the Club fresh in the 12 years since it’s release is the fact that Kenickie weren‘t just magpies; they took the classics and put their unique Northern punk stamp on them.

I mean, look at ‘PVC’. It’s Nirvana’s ‘Lithium’ in pigtails (which kind of explains why Courtney Love had a soft spot for Kenickie).

And then there’s Lauren Laverne’s lyrics, which aren’t a million miles away from Suede’s romanticising of trash life: ‘We dress cheap, we dress tacky’, ‘We’re on our backs looking up at the stars’.

All this, and we haven’t even mentioned ‘Punka’, Kenickie’s undoubted high point. In fact, screw it, it’s most bands’ high point. A joyous, glitzy three minutes of complete ecstasy on the subject of punk puritanism, it satirises and glamorises all at once.

The album finishes off on a downbeat note. The stripped down ‘Acetone’ dispenses with the power chords and attitude for a surprisingly gorgeous tale of trying to ‘dodge the sick stains on the street’.

Well, I say the album finishes there, but it doesn’t quite. Where Ash chose to end their debut album with a revolting recording of them throwing up, Kenickie show they are clearly a far more demure bunch. They finish matters with the comic japery of ‘Montrose Gimps it up for Charity’. The song is basically just a load of kids larking about in the studio having a right old laugh at each other, and is about the most appropriate conclusion to the album really.

With At the Club, Kenickie gave us one of indie’s great under-rated albums. Predictably, they ended up burning out within 18 months of it’s release. They managed just one more record, Get In, which was a far more laid-back affair which sold far fewer copies than it deserved. In reality though, there probably wasn't anything they could do to save them from an unsympathetic record-buying public which, lest we forget, was just about to embrace the horrors of nu-metal.

This was the way Kenickie was always going to end, and was a far more fitting way to finish that limping to an insipid third, fourth and fifth record like a lot of their contemporaries did.

The Legends - Over and Over (Album)

Let us get one thing out of the way from the off; The Legends is a terrible name for a band. It conjures up images of landfill Britpop revivalists, paunchy 35 year-old blokes down your local, playing Stone Roses covers convinced they are the reincarnation of Saint Gallagher.

But it seems the band’s mainstay Johan Angergård is a very busy chap indeed, serving time in two other bands and having founded Labrador Records, home of many of Sweden’s leading pop luminaries, so perhaps we can forgive him this one. Perhaps he just didn’t have enough time to pick a good name for his band (which is really just Angergård’s own project, in spite of his lurid claims of having 8 others in the band). Fortunately for our Johan, his musical talents are far more on the button than his ability to pick out an appropriate moniker.

Having left us in 2006 with Facts and Figures, a highly enjoyable record of dreamy pop laced through with electro touches, he’s back with Over and Over, a very different animal indeed.
Over and Over keeps up Angergård’s unerring knack with a pop song, but replaces the electronic influences with the occasional blast of a quality more akin to New York’s favourite ear-splitters A Place to Bury Strangers. And you know what? He’s on to a winner.

The album starts off innocently enough with ‘You Won’, a gorgeous piece of slightly distorted blissful pop. It’s not until the album’s second song ‘Seconds Away’ that you are hit by that fantastic squealy feedback, which carries in into the next track ‘Always the Same’. Underneath the noise on this song is some lovely boy-girl vocal interplay.

And from then on, the album is a schizophrenic beast, veering repeatedly between sugary pop prettiness (‘Monday to Saturday’ being the best example of this), and this incredible abrasive racket which reaches its zenith on ‘Recife’. No matter how much feedback adorns the songs, however, pop hooks are always evident.

Very occasionally the album arrives at a mid-point between the extremes of clamour and bliss, and these are the moments which arguably see it at it’s best. In the last year, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart have laid down the marker for dreamy ‘80s influenced indie pop, but songs like the aforementioned ‘ You Won‘, ‘Dancefloor’ and ‘Touch’ compare favourably with anything on their album.

Over and Over couldn’t be timed better. It deserves to be as well received as the new shoegaze bands that have paved the way for it. It may suffer slightly from a lack of cohesiveness born from trying to cram a few too many ideas in, but in world where a depressingly large number of artists play it safe, The Legends should be canonized for having such a sense of ambition.

Pocket Promise - I Burnt the Roller Disco (Single)

In 2008, Northern Irish quartet Pocket Promise released their debut EP Waving at Strangers. This was an introspective, occasionally moody affair, and you’d have been forgiven for thinking that this was heavily foretelling of their future direction.

However, a year or so on, they’ve only gone and served us with a right old curveball in the form of their first single ‘I Burnt the Roller Disco’. Just when we might have been expecting more gorgeously haunting melodies, they’ve slapped us round the face with a slice of the purest guitar pop. In fact, it’s a song which wouldn‘t sound out of place on the first Soulwax record.

Where Waving at Strangers’ five tracks were mostly piano-driven, ‘I Burnt the Roller Disco’ skips along on a playful guitar line. The cheeky melody is an interesting counterpoint to Cormac Fee’s ever-wistful vocals, both of which underpin the none-more-catchy chorus.

When it comes to pop music, brevity is usually a virtue, a point which is clearly not lost on Pocket Promise. Knowing the value of conciseness, the song ends without warning, leaving the listener eager for more.

With their two releases so far, Pocket Promise have shown us they are equally adept with gentle brooding and glitzy rabble-rousing. Consequently, their debut album which is due to land in the summer is a tasty prospect.