Koko has come to be widely acknowledged for its lavish regality, sticky floorboards and Club NME. Tonight it's the turn of the behemoth rag's Radar Tour, with four hopeful, some hapless acts pitted against a thriving pit progressively packed with fashion faux-pas and undying obsession with the next vaguely biggish thing (along the lines of *insert inherently inane act along the lines of Bloc Party/Kasabian/Kaiser Chiefs/The Wombats/Two Door Cinema Club here*).
Wilder are lamentably about as savage as Paul O'Grady, as raucous as a roadside raccoon following a misdemeanour with a Ford Fiesta, as they chop and change frivolously between genres as incohesive as three year old Blu-Tack, the nonchalant vocoded nonsense of Skyful Of Rainbows reverberating back from balconies and boxes particularly painfully. Adorned in eye patches and baseball boots, feathers dangling from pristinely predictable foppish fringes, Rough Trade's decision to stick their money in the lopsided gob of frontman Sam is utterly bemusing.
Infinitely more abysmal are atrocious East London (duh) quartet
Flats, whose level of offense is such that it takes Slipknot's immortal equation of People=Shit to petrifying, unfathomed lows.
Chapel Club too, with their debonair prison yard demeanour have been
savagely slated on this here very corner of www. when their morose indie-by-numbers ricocheted off the concrete walls of the CAMP basement. Tonight however, excruciating lyrics of "wandering back from St. Martins" aside, the sullen troupe are enough to have spots erupting in the front few rows as the sound is succinctly meticulous, every gangly guitar twang permeating a metronomically macabre rhythm section with dagger-like vigour. O Maybe I finally sounds as stadium-throttling as it did when it was first pumped from the heart of the Hype Machine, as Chapel Club now seem to have distinguished themselves as the morbid Maccabees capable of grasping attention for timescales equivalent to the majority of shoddy vampire diaries perpetually scribbled across TV guides.
And so to tonight's wild card headliners, North Welsh Stratocaster annihilators
The Joy Formidable. Certain aspects of their retrospective and cacophonous thistly indie are ultimately unfluctuating, and they're all the more superlative for their relentless drive, their pinpoint focus. What with our geographic bearings being rooted in North London, Adrian Chiles, despite Daybreak disaster and preposterously early alarm clock settings lurches from a balcony stage left affirming his ranking as perhaps the trio's most hopelessly devoted disciple; Austere and The Greatest Light Is The Greatest Shade are still the edgiest anthems never to have stirred a stadium outside of the bounds of Cardiff; and Ritzy Bryan still looks menacing enough to thrust her guitar down any inattentive oesophagus every time she leaps into the frayed mêlée before her. Where The Joy Formidable appear to have spread their wings and flown to precarious summits however, is in their ability to generate the aura of show and spectacle, as glowing baubles entrapped within glistening birdcages rasp around the band's lateral presence, and Mansun man Paul Draper is dragged on from shadowed annexes, Rickenbacker in tow to belt out a mesmerising Greyhounds In The Slips. The night's then imbued with a little sombre festivity in the form of My Beerdrunk Soul Is Sadder Than A Hundred Dead Christmas Trees and whilst Bryan may wince at the longitude of said title, its vicious vivacity is as stinging as a yoga lesson in a pine field. A slew of tracks from their concurrently untitled debut long player are aired with habitual zeal, including vehemently excellent recent single I Don't Want To See You Like This, although the majority of tonight's kinetic energy expended whilst arms float aloft is reserved for closing couplet Whirring and Cradle, sounding as ominously thunderous as the murkiest of monsoons. Best bet on these underdogs before they're well and truly in their stride...
