PLASTIC MERMAIDS / GOO LAGOON / FRENCH ALPS TIGER | LIVE REVIEW
Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff, Fri 20 Sept
Swansea’s French Alps Tiger are a band you can take home to meet your parents, though be warned: if Tell A Lie is anything to go by, they might end up caring more for your folks than for you. The quartet’s fantastic debut single is an instant hit, coasting on a surf-punk wave, big on melody and blessed with an easygoing charm. Punch In The Bowl is pure Pixies, but they’re at their best when not trying to force it, allowing the hazy guitar lines and wonky solos a bit of space to unwind. All in all, testament to local label Phwoar & Peace’s ear for promise.
If French Alps Tiger have a casual air about them, they’re nothing compared to Goo Lagoon, whose edge-free mellow-wave is the sound of Stephen Malkmus falling asleep in the sun. Dreamy is probably even more effective as a Sunday hangover cure than a can of Irn-Bru and two bags of Monster Munch. Sure, as my companion notes, they essentially play the same song seven times and Fox Rawding mumbles his vocals like Chris Martin with lockjaw, but it’s impossible to dislike a band whose beaming smiles and natural camaraderie radiate such joyousness.
Plastic Mermaids have been painted in some quarters as the unclassifiable and utterly unique result of gestation in splendid isolation on the Isle of Wight. Not so. Just reading the tracklisting for their debut LP reveals that they’re firmly under the sway of the Flaming Lips’ intoxicating influence: Aquarium Acid Trip, Floating In A Vacuum, 10,000 Violins Playing Inside An Otherwise Empty Head. Even the album title itself, Suddenly Everyone Explodes, is an echo of the Lips’ song Suddenly Everything Has Changed. But it takes considerable chutzpah and ambition to do that self-invited comparison a modicum of justice – something that Plastic Mermaids achieve with ease.
1996 gets us off to a stunning start, recalling MGMT before they disappeared far up their own rear ends; brilliantly named single I Still Like Kelis chugs along cheerfully like a Guided By Voices song covered by Grandaddy; and Taxonomy toys with modern electronic pop tropes before blowing up unexpectedly into a Spiritualized hymn.
Older tracks Drømtorp and Polaroids, performed back to back mid-set, perhaps unwittingly serve to underline the strides that Plastic Mermaids have made, their solemn and perfectly serviceable semi-post-rock lacking the invention or splash of vibrant colour of the newer material. Not that Suddenly Everyone Explodes has seen the band leave stirring epics behind, though; on the contrary, set- and album-closer Luliuli and especially Yoyo – with its scream-with-eyes-closed refrain “Why are you holding onto me?” – have a cumulative power that you would hope might force them into a few more people’s consciousness.
words BEN WOOLHEAD