Electric Soft Parade are a band I listened to avidly as a teenager with shoulder-length hair and a paper round. Crunchy guitars flinging four-chord refrains. Soaring chorus melodies. Tambourines. As I remembered them, the kind of well-executed, fundamentally unadventurous, post-Britpop sound that saturated the pages of NME in the early naughties.
I arrived at London’s Bush Hall not knowing what to expect of a band who had once piqued my youthful passion for all things block chords, but hadn’t registered on my radar much since. I was further disconcerted by the venue itself, which hides its carpeted, chandelier-ed, cornice-moulded hall behind a rather inauspicious looking bar serving tinnies of Tennents and advertising “traditional British pub food, with traditional values”.
I had further mixed feelings about the lead singer of support band Cold Crows Dead, as he held a mimed-handgun to his head during one especially apocalyptic song. None of this led me to expect great things. However, the super-fan careers advisor standing next to me (we made friends over a cheese and onion crisp), informed me that I was about to be pleasantly surprised. And as the stage was suddenly bathed in swirling projected visuals, moments before the band appeared, my expectations took a marked turn for the more optimistic.
The five members of Electric Soft Parade shuffled unassumingly on stage, before breaking confidently into the grandiose stoner rock of ‘The American Adventure’. The first few bars of this sprawling 7-minute track from the band’s second album, prompted disproportionately audible excitement from the rather select number who had made the journey to Shepherd’s Bush. I guess my careers advisor friend wasn’t the only person there with a passionate dedication to the band’s back catalogue. For me, comparatively ignorant, this first track was a revelation. Where the band had previously sounded a little flat and predictable on record, live (perhaps due to the decade they have had to practice since releasing The American Adventure) they now produced an enveloping wall of sound. I was particularly taken aback, in this song and throughout the set, by Thomas White’s guitar pealing off in vibrant, masterful solos.
In spite of the recent release of their album ‘IDIOTS’ the band played a set drawing equally on tracks from across their 11 years and four albums. In their endearingly matey stage chatter the White brothers, Thomas and Alex, unashamedly (perhaps even gratefully) pointed out that tracks from their first album, ‘Holes in the Wall,’ are still received with the most enthusiasm at their gigs. And so it was this evening – ‘Start Again,’ ‘Empty at the End’ and ‘Silent to the Dark’ had the crowd bobbing and politely tapping their feet. Had it been the kind of venue in which to mosh unrestrainedly, I’m certain we all would have done so!
The new songs they did play from ‘IDIOTS’ were noticeably more mature, but for this did lack the edge of earlier material. Towards the end of the set in particular, things took a turn for the slower, softer and more confessional, with ‘Welcome to the Weirdness’ standing out, against a set of otherwise riff-led tunes, with its thoughtful lyricism. My careers advisor friend, diligently translating all the while, explained that the White brothers had lost their mother in the process of writing ‘IDIOTS’. Slightly oblique lyrics took on a new poignancy. The one irredeemable bone I have to pick with the band is their omission of ‘If That’s The Case, Then I Don’t Know’ from the setlist. It’s a stonking tune with an explosive riff, which would have been the perfect encore-closer.
Instead they left us with the new album’s title track ‘IDIOTS‘. Another 7-minuter, it springs from sugary pop to heartfelt, dreamy choruses, arriving through innumerable tempo-changes at anthemic cacophony. In many ways, I will admit, an appropriate note to end on, sonically surveying the staggering range of sounds that the band have historically played with, repackaging them in a new, experimental way. It was a compelling gesture to the future from a band that I had been prepared to write off as past-it!
I was the Careers Advisor and The Electric Soft Parade were on top form. The Cheese & Onion crips weren’t bad either!