THE PADDINGTONS – Reading Plug & Play, 08/10/08.

Having hung with Pete Doherty during his Libertines heyday and followed hot on the heels of London bands like The Others, The Rifles and The Holloways in 2005, Hull punk-poppets The Paddingtons could be forgiven for beginning to fear that their time had passed. The recent announcement by Carl Barat that Dirty Pretty Things had “run its course” couldn’t have helped matters much, but happily The Paddingtons skip daintily over the corpse of DTP with a new album packed with old fashioned Clash-aping britrock grit. Nestled in the dingiest corner of a Reading industrial estate, the band take the stage at Reading’s Plug & Play and proceed to tear through a set rammed with first album highlights such as ‘50 To A £‘, ‘Sorry’ and ‘Panic Attack’ as well as tracks from new album ‘No Mundane Options’, new single ‘Stand Down’ being a particularly heady highlight.

Although the band seem slightly disappointed by the size of the crowd, it doesn’t serve to dampen their ardour and they continue to lead a frenzied mosh through a dizzying blend of old and new material. One of The Paddington’s strongest appeals is their pacey punk vigour, but therein also lies their main weakness: everything they have to offer has been done so many times before it’s a bit like looking at a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopied facsimile. Ultimately, The Paddingtons stand too close to their influences to see the possibilities that lie beyond them, but when they play a song entitled ‘Hey You (What’s The Point In Anything New)’ with such riotous abandon that the light fittings sway, you begin to suspect that they simply don’t care.

BRITISH SEA POWER – Brighton Corn Exchange, 02/10/08.

‘The scene’ might be in one way in 2008, but far from the madding crowd, things are very much as always. Forget the multicoloured bukkake-arching neon-cumshot dance laconica and sneery-beery rock misadventure of today’s musical contemporaries, British Sea Power are a return to the noble schmindie ways of yore: all moth-eaten sweaters and wide-eyed earnestness that provides a neatly unassuming foreground to their epic melodica, which explodes like several grenades in a firework factory. While the rest of indie Britain scrabbles around in the dirt chasing the tail of their own egos with toiling pomposity, BSP refuse to compromise their sound with the passing trappings of contemporary fashion and continued to forge their own unique avenues of wonderpop.

Songs like ‘Waving Flags’ and ‘No Lucifer’ are pithy pop gems without an inch of flab, boasting more solemn melodies and blackened grooves than a bodypopping undertaker. Combining lyrical swathes of alluring assurance and tender defiance, ‘Trip Out’ and ‘Larsen B’ come across like Alexander Trocchi fronting The Delgados after both have ingested just the right amount of Port Ellen. BSP are an idiosyncratic hopscotch of powerfully subtle British indie pop; strong words softly spoken that still serve to deafen the trite warblings of lesser acts, who stand pouting listlessly as their highly-derivative walls of sound leap around aimlessly in the background.

Sure, BSP are far from perfect live: they look as nervous as cats that have just got back from the vet, have little onstage charisma and don’t engage much with the (already admittedly rapturous) crowd, but these are flaws that can be beaten out of them. Besides, by the time ‘St Louis’ has rolled around and built to its beatific climax you begin to remember that life is short and art is long – the indie kids of the distant future may well spend their days poring over the remains of MGMT’s wardrobe, but it’ll be BSP tunes they’ll be whistling. The band continue their slow burn ascent and 2009 could be the year that they follow Elbow into the choppy waters of mainstream recognition.

Then the lights came up and it was time to go home. So we did.

ROOTS MANUVA – Oxford Carling Academy, 04/10/08.

Longevity tends to elude most hip hop acts, but Roots Manuva has crept steadily along the musical margins as poppier folk such as Dizzee Rascal and the like have leapt into the spotlight with their chart-humping headaches, quietly amassing a dedicated legion that started with MOBO-bothering debut LP ‘Brand New Secondhand’ in 1999. While most mainstream hip hop acts are either limply protesting art whilst relentlessly pursuing commerce or painting themselves into ever less interesting corners with feverish sampling, Roots Manuva keeps it simple and plays to his strengths. Live, he has gone back to basics, though this is not to suggest that he was basic in the first place – his tumbledown charm and steely resilience pushed back to the fore amidst a sea of classic bump-thumpy beats.

As dub woomphf and icily dispassionate strings come together to form cuts of chillingly catchy cool, a set spanning the highlights of ‘Awfully Deep’ and ‘Run Come Save Me’ keep the crowd bubbling as the man known to his mother as Rodney Smith stalks the stage. New single ‘Buff Nuff’ may be a messy 8-bit stab at the charts that sounds as dissonant as the inside a motorbike helmet seconds after a head-on collision but the rest of ‘Slime & Reason’ still showcases enough evidence of Roots Manuva’s throaty rhetoric and zeitgeist-rogering beats to ensure his significance. Elsewhere, ‘Dreamy Days’ couldn’t be gurning any harder if it removed its false teeth and entered a whimsical seaside competition, bringing a woozy urban ambience to the leafy shires of Oxford.

Live, ol’ Rootsy doesn’t attempt to go anywhere you don’t expect him to, although this is not necessarily a bad thing. ‘Witness (1 Hope)’ is still a tremulous bass squelch of stairwell funk that sounds singular and rallying and ‘Too Cold’ a forgotten chunk of loopy chatterbang like sounds like Stringer Bell flailing around an orchestra pit. In a room full of nodding heads, it’s mission accomplished for Roots Manuva.

CRYSTAL CASTLES – Electric Ballroom, 18/09/08.

Andy Warhol once said that art is what you can get away with. Sure, the art of shoving a grenade up an Atari’s disk drive and recording its death-rattle might seem unadorned but it is precisely this brand of punk simplicity that has allowed Crystal Castles to amass legions of converts on both sides of the Atlantic since ‘Alice Practise’ skipped daintily onto MySpace in 2005. As anticipation slowly fills the room and builds to fever pitch, this pair of scuzz-funk bags o’ doom sashay onto the stage with more louche confidence than a peacock on ketamin, launching into their Ramones-trapped-inside-a-Sinclair C5 sound with a breathless vigour that comes packing more hooks than an abattoir. This isn’t anything new, Crystal Castles have continued to hurdle expectation like a meth-fed spring lamb for months now, haven risen from the Toronto club scene to cusp of greatness in the space of a few short years – newie set opener ‘Exoskeleton’ hinting that they might just be more than one trick ponies.

Alice and Ethan, bolstered by the power of a live drummer, tear through their set like they’ve got both feet nailed to the accelerator, creating a thrilling cacophony that’s akin to stapling an 8-bit console to your head and diving headfirst into a threshing machine. The bass feels as if you have a large bid trapped within your ribcage, beating itself to death and from the off, the crowd respond by going inevitably batshit. Barely pausing for breath, the band unleash ‘Baptism’ and ‘Crimewave’, the latter a digi-funk powerhouse that can’t fail to leave those with even a glimmer of a trouser pulse spasming in sexual glory. It sounds like a disgruntled 8-bit console grew legs and jitterbugged around the room before kicking Mario down a liftshaft.

Undoubtedly, Crystal Castles are the gloriously schizophrenic sound of 2008. Their music contains both a riotous punk fury as well as a full quota of sonorant pop hooks: theirs is a sound that’ll bite off both your ears but, as you collapse in a pile of your own blood and terror, stick around to whisper soothing platitudes and tenderly stroke your hair until the ambulance arrives. ‘Alice Practise’ and ‘Air War’ tear along like a brakeless train colliding into a warehouse full of defunct Gameboys until ‘Courtship Dating’ arrives in a blaze of arcade nihilism. A song so good that Timbaland lifted it wholesale for Fiddy Cent’s lamentable ‘Ayo Technology’, it has grown into veritable planet-leveller from months on the road, a snarling beast that picks you up by your hair and throws you across the room, before ‘Black Panther’ and ‘Yes No’ drag you outside and you wake up bloodied and confused in a ditch half a mile down the road. With bitemarks and everything.