Thursday 15/03/07 Love Is All, Late of the Pier @ Cargo, London

Teenage lads sporting brightly coloured clothing, scruffy haircuts and owing more to LCD soundsystem and Klaxons than The Libertines and The Kooks. Sound familiar? Well, yes, admittedly you could group Late of the Pier with other youngsters purveying those all too trendy indie-electro paths, but tonight at Cargo there’s something about these tykes that’s incredibly endearing.

Whether it’s the robotic dance moves that put Peter Crouch in the shade, crowd banter from the ludicrously named band members Red Dog Censula et al. (The Horrors eat your heart out) or just the great tunes, who knows? But couple all this with an overwhelming enthusiasm and stage presence and you’re left desperately conjuring up all the superlatives that come to mind. Oh, and ‘The Bears Are Coming’ is perhaps the finest song featuring wooden bed slats that this hack has ever had the fortune of hearing. Truly, Late of the Pier can carve their own niche in what is an ever crowded market for their genre, then great things beckon for these Nottingham lads in the future.

All of which tees us up nicely for the impossibly loveable Love Is All. Kicking off with album opener ‘Talk Talk Talk Talk’, pint-sized frontwoman Josapine Olausson is a bundle of energy, her vocals as perfect as they are on record, while gangly Fredrik Johanson almost busts a blood vessel pumping out their trademark saxophone lines throughout. Switching between hyperactive numbers like a whirring ‘Spinning & Scratching’ to the more plaintive moments (‘Turn The Radio Off’), there’s nothing much that escapes their cannon tonight and all of it is pulled off emphatically. As on record, the strength in Josaphine’s voice is her canny ability to effortlessly shift between almost schoolgirl-esque ditties to a more sinister-edged tone, typified on a blitzkrieg rendition of new single ‘Aging Has Never Been His Friend.’

If there’s any slight critique to be fired at Love Is All tonight, it’s that the latter half of the set is perhaps weighted too heavily towards newer songs that lack that vital familiarity factor. But to criticise them for this would be too harsh, as the songs still contain all the qualities that endeared us so much to ‘Nine Times The Same Song’ last summer. By the time we reach the buoyant, yelping finale of ‘Trying Too Hard’, it’s clear that tonight has been a total treat. Great stuff.