Yahoo! Music Review

Gig played on 16/01/09

The beginning of a new calendar year is about as perfect a time for discovering new music as December is for avoiding baubles, the colour red and adverts for "Eastenders"' annual Christmas argy bargy. You will by now have been impregnated right on schedule with a select handful of names, cropping up on list after list, deigned the most-likely-to with such pre-ordaining authority that you have little option but to hand over your cash and make them famous. If the whole ordeal seems depressing to you, spare a thought for London-based indie troupe Red Light Company. Not because they weren't featured, but because in the scrum they've been largely eclipsed by the looming spectre of similar dead-cert White Lies.

But it's possible that Yahoo! Music has nary stood before a band more precision engineered for success, with practically every aspect of their construction previously market tested. Their sound essentially takes The Delays' rusting chassis - built for head-out-the-window harmonies, cruising safely beneath the national speed limit of course - and soups it up, bolting a spoiler on the back, daubing it in black paint, screwing up the floral air freshener and making sure there's nothing but Killers and U2 CDs in the glove box. "Pimp My Ride" under Steve Lamacq's directive, if you like.

It's no surprise that their whole appearance is straight off the peg, every motion lifted rigidly from the universal rock-pose index, but they even go a step further than that. Toiling, denim-clad guitarist Paul Mellon is a spit for Didz from Dirty Pretty Things, bassist Shawn Day a baby Taka from Feeder and keyboardist Chris Edmonds is pounding passionately before you can say Tim Rice-Oxley. Frontman Richard Frenneaux is a more peculiar cross between Nickleback's Chad Kroeger and a malnourished physics student, but they all sing with the ludicrous intensity of Tom from Editors. It's like someone shook up the last decade of indie and this is what fell out the bottom.

They're a band that don't so much inspire as reassure you that everything is exactly as you think it is. But every day can't be an Animal Collective day and the sheer strength of songs on offer tonight, delivered with a reverberating exactness, have the kind of sonic, if not emotional, reach that wouldn't have shamed James or The Cure in their late '80s heydays. The ponderous seriousness of "When Everyone Is Everybody Else" makes a real impression, but it's infectious bass-driven anthems like "Scheme Eugene" and "Arts & Crafts" that will ensure their inevitability, poll or no poll.

by James Berry