The Rakes / Louis XIV / Five O'Clock Heroes @ The Wedgewood Rooms

Basically, you can't lose playing great songs about having a crap job, getting pissed and then, well, going out and getting pissed again to a bunch of students.

Everyone knew all the words. Everyone knew when to clap in accordance with the videos so heavily rotated (quite rightly) on MTV2 in recent months.

Short, sharp and utterly to the f-ing point, the band rattled through the shouty 'Strasburg' and we sang along to new favourites 'We Are Animals' and 'Violent' ("...Viiiiiii-oh-LENT!").

Whether the students watching tonight continue to champion The Rakes concise commentary about having worthless McJobs solely to pay for ten
aftershocks and forty Bensons every Friday night once they've completed their dissertations remains to be seen.

But on this current blistering form there was more than enough angular guitar pop to make you pogo until you yakked up your vodka Red Bull over your best mate's bird's mate.

More importantly for the future, The Rakes are perfectly positioned to fill the vacuum left by those saviours of the three minute rock song - The Strokes - who continue to unveil their new introspective-space-rock-prog-racket to the world.

Latest single 'Binary Love' perhaps offered a glimpse of new direction for The Rakes; smartly proving to be sparse, minimalist, weird and yet still catchy in well under four minutes.

And then suddenly the encore was upon us. Which in effect increased the running time of the set by about a quarter...not that we gave a toss.

Closing with the all too brief '22 Grand Job' left everyone breathless for more and the urge to stay out for the night and carry on getting trollied.

But as Alan pointed out to us, it was '...Sunday night and some of us have to be up for work in the morning...but not me, 'cos i'm a pop star now'!

Yes, you are mate. And we applaud you.
Wham, bam, thank you Alan.page << 1 2 3 >>