Times New Viking, No Age & Los Campesinos!, Glasgow Art School, 18th October

Damn, I really meant to do some Times New Viking listening in the week leading up to this, somehow didn’t. And double damn, the whole gig has been shifted forward by an hour and a half, so I have to run all the way from the bus station to catch the second half of their set. Perhaps this wasn’t meant to be, but listening to Rip It Off this morning they do sound like one amazing live band. It was worse for Chris, who stood on the steps outside in a snail-paced queue listening to them rattle off ‘their six best songs’ though several solid stone walls, fuming. Once we got inside, the pace of the set slowed a little, songs stretched out beyond the three minute mark, and it was all good stuff, fuzzy, frantic, plus American and no-nonsense (there’s something great about the way certain Americans can rock as casually as if they were walking to the fridge in their dressing gowns for some milk), but it would have been good to see the poppier end of the set too. Another time, hopefully. The singer / drummer had a Sic Alps T-shirt on, which seemed like a good thing.

No Age’s set didn’t have a poppier end, but let me tell you what it did have. A (nother) singing drummer who sounded like he came from the same street as Daniel Johnston, a deeply southern accent and even some similar tunes (as one song finished I could have sworn it was a cover of ‘Why / Without You’, but it was over too fast to really tell). A guitarist who looked rather like Chris O’Dowd from The IT Crowd, which is to say, more than slightly out of it, with curly hair. He could not understand a single heckle. Their songs had mellow, effect-laden intros but went pleasingly mental as soon as the drums came in. For the final song the drummer came to the front of the stage to sing, the guitarist swapped his semi-acoustic for an SG, started up with a metronomic delay / loop thing, which he left running as he clambered to the top of a speaker stack. He sorted out his pose, wobbling a bit, whilst the drummer returned to his drums and prepared for even more mental-ness. Which duly exploded, and was so fabulous that the guitarist was inspired to wedge his SG into the lighting rig (à la Kawabata Mokoto at Stereo last year), where he left it as he climbed down to stage level again. Unlike Kawabata, this fellow left the guitar plugged in, and, not really having thought it all through, attempted to remove the lead by giving it a good yank. Bringing the guitar crashing down, and nearly killing several of the front row, had they not moved back pretty swiftly. He came over to apologise, like it had been a total surprise that the guitar had fallen when he pulled at it. There was a stunned silence. Still, no-one was actually hurt, and it did prove I suppose that No Age really are as stupendously dumb as their sound leads you to hope they might be. Which is great for indie rock, but if you go and see them, do stand back a bit.

The headliners were Los Campesinos!, which I was cautiously looking forward to, having heard a few singles and quite liked them before they got annoying and had to be deleted. Their dreadful cover of ‘C is the Heavenly Option’ was the point at which I gave up, but I didn’t mind their own songs so much, and imagined that they might be the kind of thing better enjoyed live. But sadly not. ‘They’ve got a publicist,’ muttered Chris darkly, as they lined up on stage, about a hundred of them, the male singer in a red hooded top, the female one with woollen orange leggings on her arms. They made a pathetically ‘big’ noise, with the total opposite of the American bands’ insouciance: they meant it, they were going to sing their little hearts fit to burst to deliver their message that indie pop is where it’s at. But hang on, Los Campesinos!, where do you think you are? You’re preaching to the converted, and you aren’t doing it nearly well enough. I’ve nothing against ultra-reverential / referential Welsh pop, but these guys should really leave it to Helen Love. If you’re going to sing about being excited by pop music, you’d better make sure the songs you sing are the equal of the ones you’re singing about (this is why ‘Does Your Heart Go Boom’ is the most ambitious pop song ever – not quite better than ‘Baby I Love You’, but closer than is reasonable). Doing COMPRESSED TO THE MAX thumping and whacking a xylophone over the top is not the same thing. But what really annoyed me was that they dedicated a song to Kenickie, ‘to mark the tenth anniversary of them splitting up.’ Just... don’t, OK? You are not in the same league, you are not even playing the same game. Having left it rather longer than we should have, we walked.

As for Kenickie, remember them this way.