Gig played on 06/03/07

A few years back, Yahoo! was stood in this exact same King's Cross space cowering from Godspeed You Black Emperor. Here was a sprawling, devastating musical vision seemingly fighting their own war on terror. If memory serves, the Canadian sonic nightmare brought this latest cataclysmic show to a compelling close. Marching funereally through the crowd like pre-9/11 grim reapers, a single bell tolled as they made their exit. Despite clear comparables in size, scale and beaten worldview, tonight The Earlies behave rather more like a Tennessee bar house band in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

"One Of Us Is Dead", for example, has a bleakness utterly belied by the twinkling, sumptuous bed of sound on which it's created by the ten-strong Transatlantic collective. Gleefully swapping instruments and giddy glances at each other despite the surely upsetting turn of events at hand, out front is Brandon Carr, who looks like a country rock drop-out lost in time. Which it seems The Earlies very much are, in a retro-futuristic way. Again, like Godspeed, here is a group like no other, sculpting a complex, ambitious jungle of music that a focus group of paranoid schizophrenic's headed by John Nash would struggle to invent.

In the main, it is a very beautiful, very psychedelic thing. It also really demands to be seen live. Like their debut, "These Were The Earlies", new LP "The Enemy Chorus" is a many-headed and also many-tentacled beast. You might call them prog if it didn't alarm people as much as the 'c' word. Needless to say, with around 1000 instruments on-stage - at one point a tuba is manfully hauled on like a bronze hippo - Carr's promise to "blow your house down" on "When The Wind Blows" is achieved on a series of occasions.

From the new LP, "No Love In Your Heart" builds epically to a crescendo of sci-fi synth, horns, strings and multi-tracked vocals, while "Enemy Chorus" takes their gift with a hypnotic locked groove farther out into the solar system. However, that's not to say these songs don't touch the heart while also lawn-mowing the head. "The Ground We Walk On" is truly touching, a teary-eyed piece of floating pop to match older material like "Wayward Song" and the aforementioned "One Of Us Is Dead" for emotive bewonderment.

Embracing Technicolour touchstones as random as The Beach Boys, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Mercury Rev, The Beatles and Neu, if you called this group a smorgasbord they'd probably ask to play it. This evening, the already dazzled crowd are mauled by the military Eastern raga wig-out of the aptly-titled "Breaking Point", before the cortex burning strobe psychedelia of encore "Morning Wonder" brings both the curtain and, as promised, the house down in a blinding traffic of white lights. Make no mistake, these were The Earlies.

by Ben Gilbert