by Dai Howells
Throughout tonight’s gig, there’s one band that keep bubbling up from the subconscious: The Horrors.
(Ok, yes this is a review of Chapel Club but you’ll have to bear with me on this or else these will be an uncomfortable few hundred words for the both of us).
See, when The Horrors first came to people’s attention, they were an infuriating band. They came across as prickly in interviews and made preposterous claims about their music, despite not having the tunes to back them up. The NME jumped on them like a bandwagon junkie craving its next scene fix and they were the very epitome of style over substance, with their spray on jeans and ridiculous haircuts.
But by Christ did they deliver a storming live show. Shorn of the hyperbole and press circus, The Horrors played a blinder, showing a band that was an exciting prospect live and one that was wholly different to its recorded and written entity.
Then came album number 2 (and then 3), a decidedly more radio friendly offering that paved the way for chart success, adoration across the media and a live show that went from an agitated python to a paralysed slow worm. So, a cautionary tale, then, for tonight’s headliners Chapel Club.
This tour sees Chapel Club play two sets, a first of new material and a second of tracks from their debut. Unable to reconcile the two sounds into one live set, the band sought to separate them entirely. It’s easy to see why they’ve done it. Material from their upcoming album takes on a decidedly more electronic bent, with guitars eschewed in favour of synths and the acoustic drum machine barely used at all before the interval, relegated behind its electronic counterpart.
The songs are perfectly reasonable and a unique amalgamation of electro-lad-rock, but it’s not the kind of material that gets anyone in the building excited beyond a barely discernible head nod. The older material stood out as being far superior, with its all-encompassing reverb and goth-tinged vocals. I hope, for their sake, that once the new album is released it will also fall into the “Greatest Hits” category.
Of course, playing unreleased material to a crowd of first album fans is always going to get a muted response, especially if it’s such a different sound. Though, it can work. Case in point the triumphant recent set at this venue from The Maccabees, whose new material sounded extremely alien, but still blew the socks off of anyone lucky enough to be in attendance.
Reinvention is fine, nay, extremely good, especially seen as the opposite is to do an Oasis, by way of copying and pasting your Beatles-aping plagiarism into album after album after album after bloody album. But in doing so you have to make sure the new material h as the drive, passion and vitality of old, or else you end up looking like The Horrors, with a charting album but eyes as cold and dead as a Geordie Shore chimp.
