Yahoo! Music Review

Gig played on 25/04/08

Why have We Are Scientists become so popular in Britain where thousands of similar spectacle-wielding, Pavement-obsessed art-rockers with facial hair quirks failed? How do they sell out the multi-levelled Shepherd's Bush Empire twice when the likes of The Rapture would find it tricky to fill the toilet of the Trinity in Brixton? Why, indeed, have so many under-18s flocked here tonight when they should by rights be out buying guns, drinking their body weight in lighter fuel and getting 10-year-olds pregnant?

Good questions all, and ones answered by the end of tonight's show. Because We Are Scientists are simply more fun than all the above (even the lighter fuel). They might lack the pop blitz of The Killers, the cool of The Strokes or the originality of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but they do one important thing better than all three: entertain their fans. Tonight is all about buzzing, hook-heavy indie rock with enough big riffs to agitate the mosh-pit, interspersed with genuinely funny banter. It would take a stony heart to walk out of here without a smile.

So "Ghouls" opens with scratchy guitars and a doomy vocal chant, and for a moment this could be Interpol. But then the drums pile in and the pace picks up, and never drops again. "Impatience" roars in with Cheap Trick power chords and a swaggering vocal from Keith Murray, a charismatic and beaming frontman. Where so many New York bands hide behind a sulky cool, neither Murray nor bassist Chris Cain try to conceal the fact they love their jobs, as when they practically giggle their way through an irresistible "Nobody Move Nobody Get Hurt". It's a sensibility that's infectious, judging by the irrepressible good humour of tonight's crowd.

Which isn't to say that everything's flawless. The set is long and the pace so relentless that some songs blur into each other. More troublingly, most of those blurry tracks come from the new record, like messy new single "Chick Lit" and the distinctly ordinary "Dinosaurs", while most of the stand-outs come from their first, like the crunchy riffed, breathless "The Great Escape". But there are enough exceptions - like the hypnotic, needling single "After Hours" - to suggest this could be due to a troubled gestation (the departure of drummer Michael Tapper) rather than a loss of talent.

Either way, such doubts seem churlish in the face of the sheer energy and vivacity of tonight's show. We Are Scientists will probably never win awards, but when you win hearts that's perhaps not so important.

by Jaime Gill