Music review: Less than Jake

Published on Thursday 20 November 2008 19:32

LESS THAN JAKE * ABC, GLASGOW

PERPETRATORS of a low-rent, booze-swilling, knuckle-headed brand of frat-boy power-punk that makes Blink 182 look like Faust, it's difficult to find any positive angle on Floridians Less Than Jake.

Yet, after 16 years together, they're still beloved by throngs of mostly teenage revellers, a sizeable bunch of whom nearly pogoed the ABC floor in at this gig. One girl had travelled to all but a single date on LTJ's entire UK tour – 17 shows in total, of which this was the last – at a cost of 1,300. She was brought onstage for a shot of something nasty-looking by way of reward, which was the least she deserved.

It was a solitary pleasing moment in a gig where the tone started low – with a female fan in a Star Wars storm trooper helmet joining the band onstage to dance topless – and seemed to only get lower with every devil horn, comedy hat and scream of "put your f*****g hands up".

There's definitely a very basic quality to LTJ's fast, melodic, chorus-heavy power-punk thing, but it seems lazy that, after so many years, the only slight variation they've come up with is the occasional employment of choppy ska rhythms and parping horns.

There's nothing wrong with a band's raison d'tre being to make music for disaffected kids to get stupid to. But for a group to actually go out of their way to be as reprehensibly dumb as possible at every turn, there's surely no excuse.