LES FLAMES! are in their element tonight: it's a decent stage in a big scruffy bar with a hundred plus smiling faces to hear their best shot. Their best is crackling rock n' flaming roll. Fierce, funky, full-on and frantic. My favourite band of the night. The attacking attitude, the manic rush of songs played with clattering tightness are perfect for the time and place. They loved it, we loved them. Henri was totally convincing as the hyperactive spizzbomb up front. Entertainment value: immense.ROLLA were different. They're dressed up for something grander than this. A big crowd surges in for their big stadium sounds, but it needs to be 20,000 more to make it complete. In a smallish venue the moves are a bit slow and the poses look a bit rehearsed. The steady four four caters for the echo in a huge venue, but doesn't quite whip it up in a smaller space. The Les Paul wielding singer has a great high register voice and looks like a cross between Frodo Baggins and Lovejoy. He gets the ladies in the audience wriggling with it and the place is seriously full. They are good. But for all their obvious polish and quality Rolla don't have the killer songs and riffs that would make the pointing and pouting look justified. Their fans love them and they will be serious contenders for the Festival stage. But to my jaded ears the music doesn't get high enough off the ground to really compete with the yachtloads of millionaire exponents that have been playing this stuff down the years.
WHOLE SKY MONITOR have a great name. Confirming popular prejudice against anything alternative or independent, their set tonight is a mournful drudge through thuddingly ponderous songs. All of Rolla's 250 fans have already gone and Whole Sky Monitor's 50 interested faces (les Flames! among them) gradually dwindle to about 30 by the end. This is a shame because the last but one number splutters into a semblance of life. And then, when the show, the night, the place at Temple Newsam and even some compulsive completists are waving goodbye, they turn out a great song called Beauty (or maybe Beautiful) that is the best individual song of the whole night. The band turn out to have been hiding some very good ideas. They just don't play well enough to give them a decent outing, and they haven't got the onstage confidence to stick up for primitive musicianship. But I go home happy, imagining myself as their evil manager. I suggest they should take to the stage wearing gloves, to make the point that slick playing is never enough.
