Live: Writhing in Green Sea. Fear Of Men, The Old Queens Head.

The Old Queens Head, a pseudo-quirky pub a stone's hurl from Islington Green perhaps isn't the capital's venue most pertinent to exposing the latest in breaking acts making waves etc. and it's the muzak blared at the suited and booted downstairs that attracts predominantly. Upstairs meanwhile, the booths and creaky floorboards are desperately sparsely occupied, making for a fairly tragic scene. Up first are LA tie-dye enthusiasts and peddlers of peppy, if intermittently flimsy C86-infused electropop, White Arrows. They're overtly amiable chaps and while they may have bubbled a little when fizzed through the Hype Machine, the gear they lug up and down a seemingly purposefully haphazard staircase is a marvel of excess in itself, both in calibre and overabundance. Further marvel lies in their ability to transport it through particularly strait doorframes. They do however rustle up a pretty mean take on Fleetwood Mac's Save Me A Place, sprinkled with suitable sprightliness and undulating synths as tropical as the outlandishly muggy September climes beyond murky windows.
  WHITE ARROWS - Save Me A Place (Fleetwood Mac) by 3 Syllables Records
Oddly enough, Brighton-based quartet Fear Of Men (interview) couldn't suit this attic-like space more were it filled with a forest's worth of parched foliage. More bizarre still is that despite having garnered the buzz of an irate hive of late, there's no more than twenty bods voluntarily in attendance. While the glitzy space may look as though it's swiftly deteriorating, foggy mirrors and tawdry chandeliers disquieted by a drab selection of rawk shook up by a DJ capable of little more than bashing play/pause, the introverted ethereality that Fear Of Men commit to tape ("they're just so cheap", endearing lead vocalist and Mustang devotee Jess later coos) here comes to a stirring sense of sentience. Guitars buffeted by pedalboard grandiosity and spewed forth from a minuscule Marshall amp wriggle with an unshackled joie de vivre, while Jess and bassist Lin's vox are spectral throughout to the point that you half expect the pair to disappear from any gaze bounced back from mirrored backdrop. They linger for barely half an hour, but set closer Green Sea leaves a taste most ambrosial on the tip of these twenty tongues.