Live Review

Cloud Nothings – Electric Ballroom, London

• 29th Nov 2010

You know when you say a word so many times it begins to lose all meaning, revealing language as a hollow cipher and thus reducing communication and resultantly all human endeavour beyond basic survival to the arbitrary and desperate acts that they are, which then causes you to fall into deep despair at the absence of any meaning in life beyond its own perpetuation?

Well midway through their set at Camden’s Electric Ballroom, Cloud Nothings proved that this is equally possible with music. But this wasn’t their take on ‘Revolution 9’ (for which we can all be grateful…), but instead a result of them machine gunning relentlessly through a set of songs which you could barely recognise as the band’s own, let alone apart from each other, in the first place. I could see some guys hitting guitars and drums, one of them making noises with his mouth (actually a lot of these really aren’t words), but I no longer understood what this was supposed to be – the part of my brain that makes noises into a coherent whole had thrown in the towel.

To be fair though, it started positively. The first support slot is always a rough deal, particularly if you’ve trekked over from Ohio for the pleasure of performing at 7.45. But they take the stage with gusto, and the first couple of songs are promising. I could feel the influence of bands like the Thermals and Guided by Voices in the unpolished but melodic tunes. There even seemed to be a slight early Bloc Party-esque sombreness about it. It’s always comforting to see an American band with British influences; shows they still have their heads screwed on in the colonies.

They are young, and you can certainly feel it in their music, which has that sort of ‘soundtrack to a teenage night’ sweetness about it; the result of hyperactive happy (not joyful) chord sequences juxtaposed with sparkly lead guitar that adds just a sprinkling of melancholy. The drummer needs to drink a bit less juice by the sounds of things though. He is very excited, judging by the pace of his drumming; although credit where it’s due, he does add some extra interest to the proceedings.

The problem is that they do not swerve whatsoever from their established song structure; sometimes it even seems as if they don’t swerve from an established chord sequence. Repeated exposure begins to reveal flaws in their sound, which starts to resemble the sickly brain dead brutality of a Busted, or a McFly, but without the comedy elements. The unrelenting pace left me begging for a respite, and for them to calm down. I felt like a bachelor uncle charged with a bunch of hyperactive children.

The set ends positively though, with a couple of tunes, ‘Hey Cool Kid’ and ‘Turning On’, that stand out from the brown smudge that preceded them. They seem to have sharper edges, and sound a bit more sophisticated. If these guys could just take a bit more time over things – both on stage and when writing – they could well be an interesting little outfit, and not just a saccharine throwaway distraction for indie-popsters, which, I’m afraid to say, is the lasting impression they made on me.