Last week James Blake blew away the Borderline, proving he was anything but bordering on boring as his eponymous debut released this week occasionally proves to be. Last night, this year's HMV Next Big Thing festival continued across town over in a sodden corner of Highbury as superlative indie label Moshi Moshi brought their ripest fruits to the Relentless Garage. The venue's still so pristine there's an air of Liverpool Street lounge bar to its almost cylindrical upstairs area and had you a pint in hand you'd consider spewing it across the floor to add a touch of scruff to it.
Equally pristine although in a far more positive manner are London euphoric electroclash duo
Visions of Trees. Comprised of exuberant grunge beat machine Joni and bewitching accomplice Sara, the pair put the urban back in urbane, at times sounding like Salem tackling Cirque du Soleil soundtrack on No Flag, at others turning sultry and glitchy as with the confrontational Frontin'. Aesthetically there's a certain Sleigh Bells element to Joni and Sara, the former bounding about turbulently behind a block of electronics half the size of the South Bank before later karate kicking a microphone for not being switched on. Yet their musical outpour gushes with flushes of more genres than Alexis Krauss has neon-smeared catsuits, Sara remaining immobile throughout, a serenading siren lurching in shadow and ethnic shall. Their frenetic rhythms, offset by the looped vox washes of Synchronized provide the delicate highlight of thirty enlightening minutes. For light amidst the darkness, go hunting down in these woods…
Attentions then turn to patently Oxfordian quartet
Trophy Wife. Now renowned under the fabled Blessing Force banner, they gallop through a set distinctly indebted to early Foals with impetus placed on BPMs intent on getting brows sweating and arms flailing. There's even a jaunty little number by the name of White Horses. But now that their masters have wandered off into bewilderingly frigid soundscapes of self-indulgence, perhaps we need Trophy Wife more than we may initially envisage, as they utilise synthetic sounds and condition guitars to thunder out bass frequencies to glimmering effect. The expansive Microlite is certainly, to paraphrase a certain someone on Gaga day, disco heaven for the weedy and worrisome as most of tonight's crowd seem to be, ourselves included, whilst a chimerical, bloody bold take on Joanna Newsom's The Book of Right-On ensure proceedings end on the most elated of semi-hallucinatory highs as temperatures sear. Moshi Moshi are evidently still more than capable of sniffing out potential next big things, those indie truffle pigs.
