Playlouder - Music is the Network

Lovvers! Fresh from an opening slot at Download festival, on their way to Reading/Leeds, a new 13 minute 7-song E.P. coming out next month on Witchita, they’ve got people talking. Not that the youthful and artfully preened Brighton indie crowd are quite ready for the bratty art-punk clobbering they’re about to receive. It would be easiest to describe Lovvers as punk. They’re loud, trashy, and in YOUR face, bleached front-man Shaun Hencher pushing into the crowd and calling them boring for not instantly dissolving into moshpit madness. He’s got something to say, and it’s probably more than just “bands these days don’t have anything to say”, but with his distorted snarl it’s pretty hard to tell.

Ignoring his entertaining antagonism for a second and listening to the music, the reason for the “art” prefix reveals itself. There are weird rhythms here, quick time changes and subtle dynamics that hit you before your consciousness knows what’s happening. Particularly invigorating are guitarist Henry Withers’ fuzzy tech-slack twiddling, as informed by Pavement as the Replacements, which scrawl over the proceedings like a neon marker pen. At first the crowd aren’t quite sure what to make of this glorious noise explosion, apart from a few true believers at the front. Probably taken slightly out of their comfort zone by Hencher’s unrepentant petulance, people either get the hell into it or resist, standing arms folded and displeased by this challenge to their indie integrity.

Not so with tonight's headliners The Death Set. Previously from Australia and now Baltimore, they’re the early Beastie Boys to Lovvers’ early Nirvana. The (sparser) crowd’s instantly shimmying adoration indicates some kind of following over here, but it’s hard to see why. They trade in a brand of whiney tongue-in-cheek post-modern pastiche, thrashy treble guitars and pre-programmed synths. They hint of selected bits from the last 20 years of music, got a song that sounds a bit like each one, but banged out quick, easy and danceable with a pounding beat. And there’s something intensely irritating about them.

Perhaps it’s to do with the guitarists cack-handed showmanship: trying but failing to swing a mic round his head, knocking another into the crowd, almost falling off an amp he’d tried to mount.  Perhaps it’s the slick professionalism in the way that between every song they segue smoothly into a sample from a hip-hop track - co-opting some urban edginess, getting the kids nodding their heads - before thrashing out another punk-lite nursery rhyme. Or maybe it’s the other guitarist/vocalist’s New Radical’s-style hat that’s pulled down tightly over his head. Oh, and they list their influences as “comedy, positivity, friends bands, kid bands, vodka”, which is all you need to know, really.