Gig review: Peace, Glasgow

WEST Midlands quartet Peace are the latest toast of the indie disco, boasting the regulation floppy fringes, louche-to-horizontal stage presence and a vaguely modish sound involving artfully whiny vocals, clattering drums, rumbling bass and a generous application of guitar distortion.

Peace

The Arches, Glasgow

* *

They are brazen/unimaginative enough to play in front of a CND backdrop, playful enough to herald their debut In Love “the best album we’ve ever made” and completely lacking in any obvious hunger to create or communicate.

In a set which was never knowingly original, the chirpy Lovesick was a strictly by-numbers approximation of one of The Cure’s poppier hullo-sky songs, token tremelo-drenched ballad Float Forever, while melodic, sounded like a half-baked idea that Arctic Monkeys might toy with in the studio and the mundane jangle of Higher Than The Sun was definitely no relation to the trippy Primal Scream song of the same name.

At the marginally meatier end of their banal spectrum, Delicious made no attempt to disguise a bassline ripped off The Source’s You Got The Love and breakthrough stomp Wraith had little else to recommend it beyond an Afropop-inflected guitar hook which, to them that care about such things, is surely a couple of years behind the hipster wave.

There were excited squeals for their set-closer, an indiefied cover of Binary Finary’s protracted club track 1998, whose main purpose appeared to be fleshing out a thin set – and bringing their show to a climax that none of their own material could muster.