Music Review: Yuck

YOU have to call this London four-piece revivalists, such is the way that they resuscitate a very specific period of rock music – namely the era when grunge went melodic. If Alan McGee were lurking in the shadows at the Captain's Rest he would already have declared them your new favourite band, so at home would Yuck have sounded on Creation Records circa 1992.

Just don't be calling them the next big thing – both Daniel Blumberg (vocals and guitar) and Max Bloom (guitar) were in the now defunct Cajun Dance Party, a band unreasonably touted for stellar success even before they'd sat their A-levels. Marginally older and wiser, the pair look more at home in Yuck, teamed up with a powerful rhythm section in American drummer Jonny Rogoff (big of beats, even bigger of afro) and Japanese bassist Mariko Doi (instrument low-slung, scowling gaze slung even lower).

Georgia showed off an irresistible fuzz-tone melody and shredding wah-wah guitar solo, while Suicide Policeman gorgeously revealed the band's quiet, harmonic, Teenage Fanclub-indebted side.

Yuck's most obvious touchstone is the slacker rock of Dinosaur Jr., whose singer and guitarist J Mascis Blumberg invoked right down to his awkward, mumbled patter and hunchback pose. When a well-intentioned crowd member helped straighten his collapsing mic stand during closing shoegazey rock-out Rubber, Blumberg expressed his gratitude by immediately booting the thing across the stage. Whether the world needs another Dinosaur Jr. is up for debate; whether it needs another affectedly surly frontman probably isn't.