Irish Timeswriters review New Young Pony Clubat The Village and the Dave Matthews Bandat the Point.
New Young Pony Club, The Village, Dublin
The pop scene has become so accelerated that bands are leaping straight out of the rehearsal room and into the limelight. This gig, says singer Tahita Bulmer, is New Young Pony Club's "first headliner in the UK" (she must have been confused by the plethora of Topshops in Dublin), but already the London electro-disco band are being touted as the ones most likely to topple Brazilian band CSS off their critical pedestal.
NYPC are three girls and two guys who blend the Monday blues of early New Order with the glassy heart of Blondie, letting loose with all the chaotic, coiled energy of Rip, Rig & Panic. In a world of single-track downloading, the quintet are perfectly poised for pop dominance, with at least two superb, seductive, dance-along singles, The Bomb and Ice Cream. Indeed, if Ice Cream, with its lascivious line, "I can give you what you want", doesn't become an international summer hit, I'll eat my Magnum.
The band's new album, Fantastic Playground, is out soon, but tonight the Village is a playground of chugging beats, blamming basslines and breezy synthesisers, as Tahita Bulmer works the crowd like a riot girrrl leading a keep-fit class, while bassist Igor Volk and drummer Sarah Jones put down big, throbbing disco beats, beardy guitarist Andy Spence does his Chic-style guitar stabs and synth player Lou Hayter coyly administers electro-shock therapy. It's over in what seems like a flash, but given pop's ever-diminishing attention span, it's perfectly timed. - Kevin Courtney
Dave Matthews Band, The Point, Dublin
Abercrombie & Fitch, Cherry Coke, the pledge of allegiance . . . for all the talk of America as an unstoppable force of cultural imperialism, not everything about it travels.
Take the Dave Matthews Band (DMB). A hugely popular group in the US since 1991, their scratchy blues-rock appeal has never really bothered a European chart, and for many of us that appeal remains a mystery.
How they have come to making a reasonable fist of filling the Point, then, may come down to a distinctly Irish phenomenon: the J1. For anyone who has ever frittered away a portion of their student summer in jobs for which they were less than immediately qualified - a cheese chef in Manhattan, perhaps, or a go-kart mechanic in Myrtle Beach - DMB represents another distinctly American keepsake not easily available at home.
Faced with a perfectly competent acoustic guitarist and singer, leading a combination of Mardi Gras brass and folk violin, pumping bass lines and pedestrian beats, someone uninitiated to the cult of Matthews may wonder what the fuss is about.
Don't Drink The Water and Satellite, the first a noisome near-rock song with a dark mantra, the second a clean-cut example of coffee-house folk, demonstrate the musical expanse that Matthews covers. That they both seem to achieve the bland homogeneity that is the gooey end logic of the melting pot suggests the expanse narrows quickly with mainstream success.
This may be why Matthews the live performer favours long meandering jams that serve to stretch his songs into eternity with no obvious consequence.
What Would You Say, Dancing Nancies and So Much to Say are all pleasant enough tunes, but when you begin to feel that your youth has faded somewhere between the improvised brass parps and shrieks or endless fiddle marathons, affection starts to bleed away.
With neither the surprise of jazz nor the vigour of dance music - there's much emphatic nodding from tonight's crowd, but suspiciously little movement - it thickens the suspicion that this is music designed for car stereos, for night-time journeys on an endless interstate, or, tonight at least, for a lengthy trip down memory highway. - Peter Crawley
