Love Is All/Ill Ease at The Lexington, London

May 10, 2009

The audience look sullen, but then again that’s just their dress code. I partake, as a parody.

Black Time are the first support, a Leicester three-piece fronted by some dude in sunglasses who keeps going on about how “this song made the German audience cry”. Not that that’s the problem, it’s just so goddamn contrived; the singer’s wearing shades indoors for crying out loud (er, as if I’d ever do that). In fact it’s almost swineflu inducing. Pretty proficient, just entirely unconvincing.

Ill Ease is a thwacking great second support. To utilise a music journo cliche, she’s like Karin Dreijer Andersson with ADHD via a hurricane of demerera sugar. Or to be quite honest, simply bloody brilliant. Just her, her “DJ machine”, a guitar and a drumkit, it’s frenetic. Rarely in fact has the name of a solo artist been so apt – apart from No Bra, who I saw supporting Patrick Wolf at the Astoria (RIP) a couple of years ago. All the moniker failed to warn of was the fact that No Bra in fact had a moustache. Blather. Ill Ease is from Brooklyn, NYC, and is quite simply a marvel. She makes so much eye contact with the audience that it’s almost a Michael Caine/Alfie moment, or rather performance. It’s cute and slightly psychopathic in enticingly equal part. Elizabeth Sharp’s alias is part rockabilly, part lo-fi, part riot grrl – I think. Whatever, it’s flipping ace. And lyrically, there’s this simple positivity running through that, well, I haven’t heard in a while. Particularly ear-pricking are ‘Winter In Hell’ and ‘The Brooklyn Shuffle’.

Onto Love Is All - they are truly my sort of band. Scandinavian? Affirmative. Cardigans? For sure. Sexy saxophonist? Check. Music to dance like a ferret to? Double check. Beautiful/marryable en masse? Signed. And two albums in, they still sound fresh. Josephine Olausson speaks so softly she sounds like a little imp, and then there’s the naughty guitarist, making a few faux-narky remarks about London. The bassist continues masterously in some fit of vertigo, while the saxophonist sticks his apparatus fully around the mic (the drummer? I’d moniker him ‘the cheeky one’). It’s a spectacle and a half for a Sunday night.

They’re a strange polarisation between delicate-when-broken-down and full-on shrill when taken on the face of it. And it’s magnificent. And the crowd love it. AND The Lexington is a fantastic addition to London’s A-list of venues, the sound is crystalline. Love Is All dress life’s little anecdotes up in fizzy, fuzzy, all-out delirium, lyrically twee-er by far than anything else they’re putting across.

Gothenburg’s finest seem to be having a brilliant time, and complete had me on my knees. Anything out of set-closer ‘Make Out, Fall Out, Make Up’, ‘Spinning and Scratching’ (though I naturally prefer the Metronomy remix, suckers), ‘Talk Talk Talk Talk’ and ‘New Beginnings’ make for nigh on perfect dance-fabric.

All you need to do to make the perfect gig is look pretty and make the audience dance. And they do, with metaphysical bunting.