Late Of The Pier - Leeds Cockpit: 15/2/08

All about the party...
Anyone who witnessed the limping, chainmail oddity that was Klaxons on the festival circuit last year will be well aware that their time at the pinnacle of nu-rave cool was fast coming to an end. Enter Late of the Pier, a Nottingham quartet that have been working with Erol Alkan and Metronomy over the last few months and fast gaining a following amongst the amphetamine-laced electro-teens of the Skins generation.

They were out in earnest on Saturday in Leeds, their wide-eyed party-lust outdone only by the spectacle that was before them on stage. LOTP used to look pretty quaint and freshfaced blasting out their oddball bleeps behind a humble set of synths and keys; a stint on the circuit later and they’re all done out with huge silver boxes to bash on periodically when they’re not busy pirouetting. Keyboardist Red Dog Consuela (I’m guessing that’s not quite what’s written on his birth certificate) stole the show, twirling about the stage wrapped in silver lamé on another plane of reality entirely. Meanwhile vocalist Samuel Dust held the performance together with impressive authority, leaning on the strength of the rhythm and bass section to execute some impressive tempo-changes.

Their music combines seventies mechanised elecronica with art-punk, a typical contemporary mash-up of decades gone by that explodes periodically into repetitious synth-pop hooks, outdone in exuberance only by the theatrics of their stage-presence. New single ‘The Bears Are Coming’ was interrupted by an overexcited stage-invader leaping before the microphone, babbling insensibilities; unperturbed, Dust tapped out the rhythmic refrain on his back before diving headlong into the crowd. Lyrically, LOTP are completely incomprehensible, their between-track spiels proving equally weird, with Consuela shouting about snakes and Dust translating in his best German-robot impersonation. But, let’s face it, no one was there for the chat. They might be on the fringes of musical sanity, but LOTP are all about the party, an attitude that sees them set to achieve big things in 2008.