The Yacht Club – playing a free show in east London this week – have been accused of sullying their math-rock beginnings. If so, that’s all for the better, especially since math-rock has only been one component in their racing musical engine. Listening back to their early recordings from 2013, it’s clear that the core has always been Marcus Gooda’s desire to express himself in tumbling, outrightly emotional pop songs: but ones which are often better suited to cascades of notes, harmonic busyness and pushbacks against rhythm.
Other people’s ideas of stylistic restriction don’t really suite The Yacht Club – their music might thrive on additional dimensions and complexity, but it doesn’t thrive on being tethered to anything in particular. Across their five year career, they’ve pushed against the grain. For a while – while transient guitarist Dale Robinson was still in the ranks – they even sounded like the early Prefab Sprout, back before Paddy McAloon’s hedge-literateur songwriting had been buffed to a glossy sheen by Thomas Dolby and he was still rolling along like a tumbleweed of Irish arguments on the way to a fine art degree, snagging against James Joyce and Captain Beefheart on the way.
Having said that, although Yacht Club arrangements have tingled and tangled – guitars following their own cunning little patterns, popping their heads out in unexpected places – Marcus has always been a more direct, less whimsical songwriter than Paddy. Rip away most of that sparkling guitar bricolage and you’re left with soft cries from the heart, a prolonged sweet-ache adolescence with uncertainties and tremulous reach-outs, but no particular questionings of self or stance. Perhaps that’s why people also sometimes slap the emo tag on them, though they’ve got little in common with bawling, punky heart-on-sleeve confessionals. Recent songs see the band very much secondary to the interplay of Marcus’ voice and acoustic guitar, with the project now sounding like a meeting point between Aztec Camera, Boo Hewerdine and Michael Hedges with a touch of latterday pop polish, occasionally crashing into melodious electric thunder.
In a number of respects, Deafpony resemble the headliners. Their bedrock is a crystalline-clean guitar pop sound in which even when the distortion comes sailing in for assorted breaks it sounds impeccably buffed. Theirs is a rebuilt classic guitar-pop model with a brushup, based around a studied clear melancholy and boy-gang harmonising.
This vein of songwriting tends to be full of Big Star copyists, but in Deafpony’s case they’re more like science-fiction movie clones – beautifully turned out and improved on the surface, with a slightly unsettling mannequin perfection that sets them apart from the original; several strides up the other slope of the uncanny valley. Even their hints of emo roots feel lab-tinkering, obscured by reconstruction. Similarly, their music sometimes feels like flying through an architectural model of feeling. Not phony, don’t get me wrong; but somehow they’re turning the idea of perfect pop into a kind of mysterious hinterland. If they burp onstage it’ll destroy everything.
Self-described as a “brand-spanking-new poppy rocky twiddly band”, Wild Tales are actually relative veterans who’ve given themselves what I can best describe as a “method facelift”. Stemming from two previous gangs of Guildford indie rockers (predominantly Trails, with some in Atiptoe) but now reshuffled and renamed, they take the rampant cavorting meanders of guitarist Iain Kerr’s original math-prog guitar lines, march them promptly into a song-forge, and hammer them briskly into slick chord-clambering new work (abundant with pop hooks, grab-riffs and frontman Adam Rains’ join-in lyrics).
As such, they’re a cheering and uplifting opening act in what looks set to be an evening of cleverness and cleanliness. You can vote amongst yourselves as to whether you’re annoyed at the cleanliness. Personally, I’m happy to take the cleverness.
Beth Shalom Records presents:
The Yacht Club + Deafpony + Wild Tales
The Sebright Arms, 33-35 Coate Street, Bethnal Green, London, E2 9AG, England
Saturday 26th January 2019, 7.30pm – free event – information here
Misfit City 