Little Comets + Eliza and the Bear @ o2 Institute, 15th February 2017
Little Comets and Eliza and the Bear played the Institute recently. Brumlive’s Alan Neilson, always a man to tell it like it is, tells it like it is! Eliza and the Bear fans cover your eyes now:
In the worst period of political turmoil in decades and young bands still do not want to address the problems we currently face. Maybe they learnt it doesn’t sell so instead they only want to entertain with an utter lack of originality – how many songs will now include those breaks where the audience cheer or clap along with just the bass drum? Do audiences only know how to dance when the accent is on every crotchet in the bar?
Eliza and the Bear are my worst nightmare. They appear to be another well cut indie band, nice boys who write nice songs and play them very well. They remind me of a load of bands from about ten years ago, most of whom have been forgotten now and blended into one nice blob of well meaning nice indie bands (Mumm-ra, Goodshoes, Good Books, The Automatic etc). Of course the NME told us at the time these bands would be the future of indie. Before that you had your Ocean Colour Scenes and Kula Shakers and Northern Uproars — there has always been good and bad Indie – and now if you are signed to Universal you are not even Indie.
The thing is nowadays you have to look much closer to discover how truly terrible bands are because they are so professional and on the face of it they appear pretty good: they can all play well and the songs get audiences moving and clapping. But really below the surface is trite lyrics and unimaginative melodies… played with absolute precision.
It really is as if young musicians today learn stagecraft and songwriting for festival audiences first and then never progress beyond this because that mostly works and covers a multitude of sins. It would appear now that bands and the music industry want to take music away from small venues and just get everyone to festivals – bands and audiences alike: yeah, we can all watch dozens of different bands we don’t like before seeing the one we do for twenty minutes and all pretend it is the best day of our lives. Please save us from music festivals and get bands aspiring to playing down their local venues.
Has music finally started to fossilise? No. Because now we have Little Comets!
Little Comets are promoting their new album “Worhead” that is not released until 10 March, so I guess this tour is about whetting everyone’s appetite so that they get all their pre-release orders and sales in one fell swoop, to maximise chart placing impact. Let’s face it, having a so called hit is important to the longevity of a band, and if that means getting your audience to buy 1000s of units on week one, then it is better than having that same audience buying the same amount over weeks and months, when you will never get a chart placing. It’s a business.
I first heard about Little Comets about a year ago (yeah, where have I been?), but could tell immediately that this was a band with immense musicality, intelligence and humour. They remind me of Paul Simon, Dogs Die In Hot Cars and Born Ruffians and share a gift for melody and structure like Bombay Bicycle Club, Hippo Campus, The Sun Club and later Tokyo Police Club. Spikey rhythms, clean arpeggiated guitar lines, the sense that you never know what will happen next, mixes with solid melodic hooks, stunning vocal harmonies and clever lyrics.
I have to say that the albums I have heard only do Little Comets a little justice, because live they are a revelation. Maybe this is partly due to the glorious Nathan Greene on drums who not only copes with the multitudinous time changes and syncopated rhythms, he lifts the songs with his energy. The band are just so tight, but groovy and funky – this gets the audience moving much more easily and fluidly, without relying on a plodding bass drum thumping on every note. This is how to write and arrange songs – this is how music evolves.
I actually read a review of a Little Comets gig from last year where the reviewer criticised the songs for being too complicated and as such would not interest a festival audience () everything they are criticised for in that review is exactly why Little Comets are the best band to come out of Britain in recent years.
The set tonight is taken from all their releases thus far along with a handful from the forthcoming album. The great songs just keep on coming thick and fast and are mainly uptempo. A little contrast is provided with a solo version of “Woman Woman” and the glorious “The Blur, the Line and the Thickest of Onions”.
Highlights for me are “A Little Opus”, “Worry” and the incisively damning “Isles”. The ironic “Dancing Song” comes at the end of the night and I wonder whether the irony is lost on everyone as the audience acts like they are at a bloody festival. Still it’s a song that makes you smile for many reasons, and all of them good, despite it being not a great song and perhaps not worthy of closing a set.
And there lies my only criticism and I am probably being over critical, but for me the set pacing didn’t always flow, by which I mean, there isn’t a crescendo or an arc… there is no build up to something… I think Patti Smith said once that this grasping for orgasm in rock is a male obsession and why the three minute rock song became the ultimate goal, something she always intentionally worked against, and maybe Little Comets, with their underlying feminist agenda are also consciously or unconsciously striving for that too.
Maybe that rock n roll cliche of the crescendo is outdated – like encores (which they do not do, and I hate bands that do encores, so nice one). So yeah, why not just put a set together of stunning songs with no sense of overriding structure? All I know is that I have been playing their albums constantly since the gig and am not tiring of the invention that is woven into every note, rhythm and melody of every song.
At last there exists a true indie band worthy of waving a big flag that says: “The future is here”. Make sure you pre-order their album or buy it when it is released 10 March or catch them on the remaining nights of this tour… or maybe at some festival if you must.
As a footnote I have to give enormous credit to the sound engineers tonight as every note is crystal clear, and I have been in this room before when the sound has been distorted and muddy. They really made Little Comets sound perfect.
Photographs: Marc Osborne
Review: Alan Neilson