Music review: Peace

EVEN with its main media cheerleader the NME magazine having gone the way of the dinosaurs, the sort of preening, posturing, boy-ish indie-rock Birmingham quartet Peace espouse will always carry weight with young listeners of a certain disposition. That much was obvious from the high-spirited audience that turned out to see the band perform tracks from their third album Kindness Is The New Rock and Roll, and the way said young fans threw themselves about throughout the set, forming circle pits even during the slow songs (to be fair it looked like some people had come just for the moshing).

St Luke’s, Glasgow **

But quite what gets them so excited about Peace’s random grab-bag of miscellaneous retro-isms from Suede-style glam banging to baggy indie and post-rock was hard to appreciate to the point of being mystifying at times.

A dearth of originality, and the fact that one song seemed to sit incongruously beside the next – from swaying stadium ballad Float Forever to the re-potted flower power drones of their new album’s title track and the sugary bounce of Lovesick – wouldn’t have mattered quite as much if done with charm. Instead we got leather trews-sporting, vaguely Nigel Tufnel-esque frontman and lead guitarist Harrison Koisser’s witless, scatter-brained patter. “There’s only two types of people in this world,” he blathered aimlessly at one point, “lemons and bananas.”

Their best song was a cover – a thundering reworking of trance act Binary Finary’s track 1998, reimagined via the swelling, swarming guitars of Explosions in the Sky. The mischievous fake drop and pause towards the end that left the crowd moshing in silence, and subsequently sportingly booing the band, was about the only moment of real inspiration evidenced all night.

MALCOLM JACK