Metronomy

The Macbeth, London - 26 Sep 2008

by Tom Mendelsohn

One to watch

"It’s maximally peerless, much as you’d expect from a group playing album-of-the-year elect ‘Nights Out’."

It’s a very little venue, the Macbeth, and only with epic euphemism could you call the crowd ‘capacity’; in reality, the place is bursting at its seams with the in-crowd. The in-crowd which, we might add, sweats profusely throughout, in involuntary biological protest at the heat generated by cramming so many bodies into such a small room. Yes, it was hot in there, and crowded.

In all honesty, NN couldn’t tell you whether or not the band threw their customary synchronised shapes, or indeed made any movement at all. We got buried behind a clump of giant men so couldn’t see anything at all, except for a bunch of sweating necks. It left the Levi's "Ones To Watch" tagline a little wanting in a literal sense, but the band more than made up for it: guessing from our co-audience’s enthusiastic reactions, they weren’t picking their noses or giving nazi salutes.

As for the music, well, it’s maximally peerless, much as you’d expect from a group playing album-of-the-year elect ‘Nights Out’. It sounds very similar live to how it does on record, but that is a good thing when the source material rocks so ultimate, and this barely counts as a gripe at all. The beauty of Metronomy’s music is in its imagination. In many ways, they’re a keyboard-heavy electro/indie outfit of the currently-popular kind, but they have tunes, substance and all-round creative excellence that their peers can’t ape at all. We hate to come over so prosaic, but they basically just have really good songs.

You can tell that partially from the ludicrous over-crowding – Shoreditch High Street must have been a ghost town that night – and partially from the enthusiasm in the room. As a rule, no-one dances in small venues in East London to minor bands because it impedes the preening. To Metronomy, though, people were letting rip, in as far as they can without any space for meaningful limb movement.

What’s funny is that they clearly aren’t natural pop stars: no on-stage pronouncements, no funny clothes but generally sensible haircuts. They have their gimmicks – large LEDs on their chests – which demonstrate a bit of playfulness, but, as far as we can tell from our fleshy cocoon, they tend to let their extremely awesome songs do the talking, or singing or whatever, instead.

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