Where I work, there’s a toilet. And some days, Radio 1 gets piped in. Lately, inbetween the usual wishes for holy fire to rain down on London and destroy Scott Mills and Fearne Cotton, being hammered through the cubicle door has been ‘Five Years’ by Noah And The Whale. You’ve probably heard it: wan, irritating, super-catchy and impossible to describe without using the word ‘twee’. It’s a bit argh. But hey, my brother’s a fan, so LET’S GO AND GET SOME PRECONCEPTIONS BROKEN.
Into the Thekla’s lovely spaces then, so spacious you can see almost all the crowd, ignoring Planet Earth. Dolts: this is a weirdly phlegmatic performance, sparse amounts of guitar and vocals only, revolving around the eerily assured face of singer Sam. He looks like Lou Reed as drawn by Robert Crumb, but his songs have that brittle narrative thread that characterizes the Mountain Goats or Jeffrey Lewis’s quieter stuff. Completely huggable I reckon, an outcome only briefly achieved by Sleeping States, and their schizophrenic set. If they start with 10 minutes of weak shoegaze, and end with a cutesy keyboard number, the bits inbetween jump to all points on that gradient, with a Throwing Muses cover thrown in for good measure. Seemingly an attempt to bend waves of guitar into a variety of pop shapes, Sleeping States take flight a few times tonight, and misfire an equal amount. They do have the coolest drummer in the world though, she should totally chuck those other three.
Hard to be cool when you’ve got a fleet of roadies carrying piles of fluffy towels onto the stage, but really, we’re in another universe here: Noah And The Whale are instead the most blitheringly fucking nice band in the world. Every song features the words ‘heart’ or ‘love’. Between song banter about the uplifting message of the film ‘Together’. Attempts to get the crowd to sing as one so cloying you want to firebomb orphanages. And yet… beneath the antiseptic veneer lurks undeniable chops. Live brass always gives me a boner, and mixed in with NATW’s handful of more heftier numbers, pushes pop buttons only churls would refute. Even ‘Five Years’ loses its spindly nature, fired into the crowd of sickeningly loved up couples. So keep it a secret like, but tonight Noah And The Whale painted my black heart a shade of grey at least, damn their eyes.
