Yahoo! Music Review

Gig played on 29/04/08

These New Puritans' 2007 debut album "Beat Pyramid" is one of the smartest and freshest sounding records by a young British band in some years. Like The Fall gone grime, it's a deft blend of brittle post-punk, thumping dancehall syncopation and warped hermetic imagery, inhabiting a musical and aesthetic universe all of its own. But their high concept (or high pretence - depending on your point of view) art-rock and ludicrous mythologising continues to invite criticism from all quarters.

Frequently dismissed as arrogant, clueless chancers, a brace of surly, antagonistic interviews hasn't done them any favours either; spokesman and singer Jack Barnett's regulation chainmail (tonight, a preposterous smock of metal feathers that makes him look like a cross between one of Brian Blessed's Hawkmen in "Flash Gordon" and the weird loner with the crap hair in the corner of the common room) seemingly a magnet rather than a repellent for such slings and arrows.

Onstage however, whether swaying queasily or screwing his words skywards with spiralling hand gestures like he's trying to drill them into your very brain, he's a captivating lead. With lashings of dubwise echo liberally applied to his paranoid, scatter-gun psycho-babble, the overall effect is pleasingly disorientating - like hurtling through some hellish urban sprawl, abrasive buzzwords and disembodied slogans on the roadside ads strobing incessantly before your eyes. The band themselves turn out to be much easier to digest live than on record too; the over-processed feel and sharp edges of the album rounded off to reveal a skilled, intuitive unit beneath the studio trickery.

But though the set itself is sufficiently polished and functional, there's the sense that TNP are too restlessly creative to give this album the committed touring it deserves and they look more than a little bored amongst the straighter disco-friendly material, appearing happier, and indeed sounding more vital, amongst arty percussion jams like "Numbers". "Elvis" - surely the one song in their arsenal guaranteed to get those heaving festival tents jumping this summer - gets a perfunctory reading, Barnett unwilling to deliver its declamatory "If there is a God" chorus with the fire it deserves.

Greater bands have tempered their experimental urges to deliver consistently engaging live shows over an extended campaign. Do the young TNP have the discipline? Perhaps not. A jammed out "Infinity Ytinifni" closes proceedings, its menacing, boa constrictor bass line tightening around the drums as it rushes towards a nightmarish, trippy climax. Whilst the freeform approach isn't going to lift those sales, popularity or profile, it nonetheless points assuredly to a bright future for a most singular and innovative outfit.

by Jim Brackpool