throw your arms in the air for the chav-rock revolution...

gig review: the sunshine underground, cabaret voltaire, november 21 2006

NME loves them. That, right away, makes me doubt their musical promise. The NME notoriously backs a hell of a lot of posers (im not taking away credit for those brilliant bands that NME has helped along the way, there is just far between those with originality and serious long-term potential) so is it really any wonder I had my doubts about a yorkshire-based indie-dance band that has been referred to as leeds’ answer to hard-fi?

Ready to be proven wrong, I didn’t exactly get off to the best start with the sunshine underground. There is really nothing worse than showing up late to a gig. It’s even worse when the one song that made you sit up and take notice of the band when you first saw the video and heard it on mtv2 months prior is the second song of the set and you almost miss it while fighting your way through the crowd for a decent spot. But it didn’t take away from the energy created by ‘put you in your place’ which soon had most of the room dancing about while screaming along to ‘I JUST DON’T THINK I’M COMING D-O-O-O-O-WN!’ yes, mr wellington, we hear you loud and clear! (and I can’t believe I almost missed it…)

The next 35 minutes are spend in the same gear – we get the guitars, we get the fab base-lines and we get all that happy mondays/the rapture/kasabian sounding gold that makes the sunshine underground work. And while their stuff does sounds exactly like their recordings, there is no denying that ‘commercial breakdown’ is absolutely class and provides us with a real arms-in-the-air moment worthy of NME’s praise...

The sunshine underground can entertain a crowd, no doubt about that, but there is too little variety in their sound for my liking (unlike those southern staines-boys they have been compared to). But if nothing else, their hoodies+jeans+white trainers definitely conjure up images of hard-fi and while their music isn’t quite up to the same standard, they will undoubtedly have the ‘yawksheer’ natives on their side should they ever find themselves in a good old-fashioned funk/ska/pop brawl over which band has the whitest trainers...

I think that with this band, you just have to take it as it comes – their long-term potential remains to be confirmed but if hard-fi started this genre of rock’s revolution, the sunshine underground are surely among the first to join the ranks. And props to them for that...