Pale Blue Eyes

Islington Assembly Hall

Words & Pics by Captain Stavros

There’s a certain charm to bands who look like they’ve just walked out of a staff meeting and straight onto a stage. For British Birds, tonight’s openers at Islington Assembly Hall, that charm came with the faint aroma of dry erase markers and crushed dreams. Like a group of sixth form teachers living out their midlife fantasy, they launched into their set with the tightly drilled enthusiasm of Battle of the Bands finalists who've done their homework. Maybe too much of it.

Any attempt at earnest self-promotion, “We’ve got a new album out”, was met with a thunderous “Fuck off” from somewhere deep in the crowd. Undeterred, British Birds soldiered on, their drummer miming the lyrics with the exaggerated glee of a pantomime villain. It's hard not to admire their gusto, even if the vibe veered uncomfortably close to the PTA Talent Show.

By the time Pale Blue Eyes took the stage, the room was still politely half-empty. The balcony, untouched. The air heavy with anticipation or, perhaps, just a lack of fresh oxygen. Their opener, ‘TV Flicker’, drifted in with the ease of background music in a dentist’s waiting room; relaxed, inoffensive, and oddly numbing.

Large industrial fans were positioned dramatically onstage, presumably to whip up that music video aesthetic; hair tousled just so. But instead of cinematic flair, we got the frontman’s locks lifting unnaturally skyward like startled pigeon wings, creating a visual dissonance somewhere between spooky and slapstick.

A drummer who bore an uncanny resemblance to Noel Fielding offered the evening’s most visually compelling element, but the rest of the band felt like living rations; pale, portable blood banks with synths. The songs, while pleasant enough, bled into one another like watercolour on wet paper. What might have once been a cohesive sonic identity, now felt like a diluted formula, repeated until the flavour ran out.

They closed with ‘Chelsea’, a track that promised something cinematic but barely rose above the level of a grey Sunday. It wasn’t bad, exactly, but it wasn’t much of anything.

Verdict: British Birds flapped and squawked with gusto; Pale Blue Eyes drifted by like clouds on Prozac.

Better Joy

The Old Blue Last

Words & Pics by Captain Stavros

Exploding into the audience to greet friends with exaggerated and gesticulating gestures Better Joy, Manchester’s Bria Keely, negotiates her way between instruments, cables and mic stands. Bria, overwhelmed by their joy of being in London, tells the audience so. Tonight, there would a fine line between pandering and a banal performance. Better Joy’s headline gig at the Old Blue Last teetered on the edge of both. The buzz around her has been building thanks to a glowing debut EP (Heading Into Blue), comparisons to The Cure and The Smiths, and co-signs from BBC Radio 6 . So, when she took the stage at one of Shoreditch’s most beloved (former) sweatboxes, the expectation was for something quietly transcendent. What we got was...well, just quiet.

Keely opened with ‘Waiting On Time’, and for a brief moment, it seemed like we were in for something. The guitars chimed, the band found a groove, and her vocals were as breathy and animated as they are on record. But then things started to blur, and not in the dreamy, shoegaze-y way she might’ve hoped for, but more like our eyes before bedtime. Songs melted into one another with little contrast, like a Spotify playlist that forgot to shuffle.

There’s something to be said for restraint in performance; intimacy, nuance, etc., but there’s also a reason why even Phoebe Bridgers occasionally smashes a guitar. Keely remained composed to the point of being nearly invisible. A few murmured “Thank you”s here and there, but little to break up the mood-board of mid-tempo melancholy. The set lacked spark, urgency, or anything that might be mistaken for joy.

To be fair, the band sounded tight. The arrangements were well rehearsed and had potential. You can see the architecture of something taking shape underneath the potato sack facade of a performance. Great songwriting doesn’t always equal a great show, especially when the performance feels like it’s happening behind a velvet rope of middle-aged men without their children present. There were moments, like ‘Couldn’t Run Forever’, where her voice cracked with genuine feeling, but they were fleeting. By the end of the set, the audience had started checking their phones with the kind of glazed reverence usually reserved for midweek tube rides.

Keely clearly has the tools: a distinctive vocal tone, a knack for melancholic melody, and a sound that fits neatly into the indie-pop revival of the moment. But live, she’s still learning how to wield them. If Better Joy wants to make the leap from playlist darling to fully formed performer, she’ll need to bring a bit more chaos, or at least caffeine, to the stage.

Desire

XOYO

Words & Pics by Captain Stavros

It’s a school night, across from a school, at XOYO where we’ve just passed by a two-metre vertical neon banner subtly flashing, ‘SEX’ blindingly at us. We continue on descending into a lair filled to the brim with latex and vinyl clad disco vampires, peppered with a dash of Pierrot make-up to boot. Enough about the French though, because as we all know, Italians Do It Better. A third of their way through their two-month European stint, Megan ‘Desire’ Louise is out pumping their upcoming third full-length studio release, Games People Play, which drops on Valentine’s Day.

The last time we caught Desire, at the Roundhouse in 2019, they were supporting/heralding the death of The Chromatics.  Megz had been on our (and everyone else’s) radar when ‘Spell Bound’, also on tonight’s setlist, blew up the spot after being featured alongside label mates Chromatic’s ‘Tick of the Clock’ on 2009’s Drive soundtrack. Rocketing out onto the stage with a plastic Martini glass in tow, it was a mostly forgettable performance. That was then though, this is now.

Desire evolves beyond an image defined by plastic party receptacles, and now favours pouring out instead. On tap, you ask? A shaken, but not stirred, sci-fi, lo-fi, anime infused synth-tonic, semiotic backdrop, with a twist. The crowd drank it down and came back for seconds. It was impossible to know where to look at any given time. An immersive live action Escher of visual delights lay before us. The absolutely overwhelming spectacle of screens, props, sound, wardrobe, or lack thereof, and lights, had one struggling to maintain focus at any singular point for too long for fear of being mesmerized like a deer in the headlights or the low-key shame for some of walking into an adult themed bookstore.

Gone are the days of ‘fake it till ya make it’ bravado because when Megan cabarets on to the stage, plastic Martini glasses give way to a red vinyl trenchcoat and cut-throat choker. In tow, and on keys, looking as signaturely sharp as ever is Johnny ‘Alice Cooper’ Jewel in a technotronic studded leather jacket, alongside Louise Eva sporting a pair of smoke dark leaks, equally as flammable. Leading into the set, things heat up quickly with tracks like ‘Bang Bang’ and ‘Human Nature’. Megan lures the audience deeper down a taunting rabbit hole, peeling off layers till she’s left in a vinyl corset contraption (barely there) held up by sheer will alone. Covering New Order’s ‘Bizzare Love Triangle’, with lyrics splashing on the screen behind her, she encourages us to sing along with her karaoke style which, of course, we all do with little encouragement needed. A silent contract between audience and entertainer is broken halfway through when Megan looks down and notices she’s busted out, “You’ve gotta tell me when the titties bust out!”, she teases coquettishly to a jaw-dropped audience. Her crowd work is hypnotic and her choreography well-rehearsed. She roves the stage tossing roses, dipping and kicking in stiletto thigh highs flirting with the audience and relentlessly accosting her bandmates who can’t get enough of it.

Johnny Jewel’s a dark spectacle on the stage, he manages to coax Megan back onto the stage, “Playing with my heart? Finish what you start”, where we’re treated to a Twin Peaks backdrop, a shout-out to Charlotte from FedEx who got the albums over ASAP from customs and a new cut, ‘Drama Queen’; “On the road? Torture mode”. Megan, now covered in an elegant sheen of beaded sweat, doesn’t stop there, she keeps the night alive; inviting all who’ve attended to an afterparty at The Standard where she DJs alongside Johnny dropping deep cuts from across the Italians Do It Better back catalogue til 2am. Every sense was accosted throughout the night, and we left overwhelmed, and slightly inebriated, after multiple rounds of vodka shots with the Divine crew. These slickly packaged, talented lot are making their way across the continent if you’ve got a strong Desire to be entertained, get on out there and get freaky you bunch of lovely disco vampires.