Crack

Tuesday night. There’s a faint drizzle in the air as we near Thekla, a worthy setting playing host to Brighton’s self-styled art-rock nice boys on the Bristol leg of their fourth album tour.

Eschewing their once-trademark Brighton & Hove Albion footy shirts, the stage is similarly bereft of trappings usually associated with British Sea Power gigs: the arboreal delights are gone; there’s not a leaf-laden branch in site. Instead, a solitary, life-size wooden heron looks on from bassist Hamilton’s stack, and the band begin proceedings with the inquisitive Who’s in Control, the opening track from their latest LP, Valhalla Dancefloor.

Having already cemented their place as critics’ darlings, BSP draw in a decidedly older and notably testosterone-heavy demographic, leaving the string of girls at the front – dolled in adorable sailor outfits – sticking out like nodding, luminescent buoys on a calm night at sea.

Yet what remains endearing about BSP is their coy, understated arty sensibility, which manages to stay (just about) on the right side of mawkishness. This is manifest across the board; from Hamilton’s charity shop jogging bottoms, drummer Wood’s Monkees-come-choirboy style mop, to singer Yan’s bashful mutterings between songs.

It is perhaps not altogether surprising that the new stuff doesn’t whet the appetite quite so much as the more accessible and anthemic offerings such as Remember Me, Carrion and Waving Flags – the best sing-a-long paean to Eastern European immigrants one is likely to hear. But for the seasoned BSP fan, the band’s latest offerings fail to disappoint.

In true BSP spirit, Yan tunefully bellows and effortlessly caterwauls (somehow) through lyrics that are at once cosmic yet intimate, colloquial but unashamedly highbrow – ‘Oh come now, you can barely string two words together now / And you think Europe's own worst spectres are coming back to haunt us all’ (We Are Sound); ‘I'm a big fan of the local library / I just read a book but that's another story’ (Who’s in Control).

Lyrics aside, some of the musical arrangements are utterly compelling. BSP have an indefatigable knack of building up and slowing down; they mix elegant, melancholic movements with raucous gasps of joyous pain. The viola of Abi Fry (who, by the by, can be upheld as true thinking man’s crumpet, never mind Claudia Winkleman) deliciously oils the BSP machine; sliding and gliding through the guitar-induced cacophony of reverb and overdrive.

What results is a wonderfully rich, textured and expansive sound, peppered with moments of sheer angst and biliousness which teeter on the brink of mutiny, only to be retrieved through the measured, unerring syncopations of wood on taught leather skin.

Despite a somewhat anticlimactic single-song encore, the punters depart uplifted. Little wonder the heron appears to stand so tall and proud. Brighton; your boys done you good.



Words: Fred Yeast

http://www.myspace.com/britishseapower

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