Tuesday 20/03/07 The Brian Jacket Letdown @ Water Rats, London

London tonight is freezing. Gigwise stands for so long outside Water Rats waiting for our friend that by the time we enter the famously cramped back room our jaw can barely function, our fingers typing out texts so slowly that the phone gets bored and starts to seemingly write them itself. The solitary reason for our Arctic-sized excursion is The Brian Jacket Letdown. A collective of musicians from England, Brazil, France and Poland may fleetingly harbour hopes of a CSS-style rave-up, though such an initial impression is as far from the truth as Gigwise's body temperature is from a healthy average.

Singer Will Harper steps forward clutching a miniature guitar, and proceeds into a dreamy harmonica-led approximation of Pink Floyd when they were any good (that'll be the Syd Barrett influence out of the way then). This continues for about two minutes, before the harmonising kicks in, followed by all manner of jilted, wandering sounds. For The Brian Jacket Letdown are one of those bands who embellish their warm pop songs with all manner of seemingly novelty effects and unexpected shifts, ending up lending not irritancy (unlike, say, Athlete) but a charm (like The Coral or The Beta Band) to their scruffy, genre-picking aesthetic.

You can almost hear the radio controllers throwing their Brian Jacket Letdown CDs across the studio in frustration, their tiny little minds unable to decide where to play their songs, how to describe them, while all the time acknowledging that there are some brilliant tunes tucked away amongst the mainstream-unfriendly, yet surprisingly cohesive rubble. The weather outside is almost forgotten by the time the strange fivesome introduce their final song. A jerky post-punk rhythm collapses into the sort of hallucinogenic breakdown that characterised The Verve's debut album. Before, of course, everything turns into Black Sabbath for the last thirty seconds. Brianstorming.