The Electric Soft Parade, Concorde II, Brighton
A talent for tunes and truculence
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Your support makes all the difference.The Electric Soft Parade are a preposterously young band from Brighton, led by two brothers, the singer Alex White, 19, and the drummer Tom White, 17.
Going on the strength of their excellent debut, Holes in the Wall, the pair seem to have spent a good deal of their childhood acquainting themselves with Sixties psychedelia and Seventies prog rock. In short, they've done their homework – their ability to combine the sounds of the past four decades is impressive; so is their ear for a melody.
Live, however, they just don't cut it. That is largely down to Alex, a sad-eyed individual who looks as if he'd rather have his toenails pulled out than play in front of a crowd. It's hard to tell if he's shy or just moody. "This is our single," he says blankly before "There's a Silence". "It's quite long, but it's quite good." I'm all for a little humility in a band, but such awkward indifference hardly adds up to a great night out.
It's not as if the crowd isn't trying, either – every now and then a whooping sound erupts at the front, before tapering off into a strangulated whimper.
It's up to Alex's younger brother Tom, then, to lift our spirits – and he almost manages it. Such is his hyperactivity and charm that it's hard to believe he and the singer are related. He drums like Keith Moon on amphetamine overdrive, with his mouth wide open and his head shaking maniacally from side to side. When he emerges from behind the drumkit to sing, the mood lifts instantly. Looking fabulously dapper in a green blazer and tie, this man, you feel, would be much better off in the Hives.
But, alas, Alex is back up front after a couple of songs. He mangles "Empty at the End", one of the album's highlights, by singing it off key. "We don't do encores," he mutters gloomily at the end. "This'll be our last." Happily, the band pull themselves together for the final non-encore, the richly textured and emotionally charged "Silent to the Dark". Here it's reworked and overhauled into a full-scale, all-encapsulating 20-minute wig-out. It has everything – hard rock, glam rock, grunge, prog rock, electronica and at least four earth-shattering crescendos. Pretentious? Absolutely, but the atmosphere is transformed and the show just about salvaged. Heck, even Alex manages to crack a smile. Maybe there's hope for him after all.
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