Live Review

Carousels & Limousines – Brixton Jamm, London

• 28th Feb 2013

Brixton Jamm is just a little bit further than you might think from either Brixton tube or even the Brixton Academy for which it provided the NME afterparty last Saturday, with a bunch of bands playing ahead of the inevitable DJ sets.

We arrived just in time for Carousels & Limousines, a band that pretty much live up to their self-inflicted moniker of ‘Gritty urban rock with… hints of Springsteen, KOL and Gaslight Anthem’. I certainly heard the musical influences float through, although have to say that a questionmark has to remain over whether or not Frome and Bath can truly be called homes of cement civilisation. Surely a jolly jape from the collection of childhood friends that are Sam Gotley, Jamie Wales, Finn McNulty and drumming recruit Martyn James.

The Springsteen influence is buried but not too deep in ‘17s’, but is eerily present on the website version of the song. The song followed ‘Spiders’, which offers enough hints of a fairly heavy country and western style to get feet tapping right from the start from what was a decent turnout and included some well-travelled fans from the west.

The strains of Americana are further fuelled by ‘One and Only’, a song that was born as a tribute to The Ramones. Less anarchic than the punks from America, Carousels & Limousines (rather a long name, especially after previous flirtations with ‘Grace’ and ‘Dirty Kiss’) embark on another tuneful shout supported by a four-guitar jam in a song all about a romance in a small town where you don’t get the only hot girl. Nicely paced, we are picked up and put down before being advised to “walk away” – generally good advice in almost all of these most delicate negotiations of the heart.
The pause is brief before we are revived by ‘Home to Andy’s’, which is also the name of the impending first album.

‘I’ll run’, the song that follows is attached to the particularly fine lyric ‘like a cowboy to the sun’. The album version of the same song includes a keyboard, I am reliably informed by the band’s lawyer, or a lawyer who knows the band, certainly one of the two.

By now, it is, of course, time for a 1980s power ballad. And so we welcomed ‘Greasy hands’, which beseeches all aliens to takes their greasy hands off the woman, primarily in the basis that “she’s a lady”. The song finally provides a chance to hear some of the fine vocal variation that lead singer Gotley has to offer. Some jingly jangly guitars make for a sweet backdrop as the power kicks in and clapping is required. All very enjoyable, next time I may well wear a stars and stripes bandana.

Venue: Brixton Jamm, London
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