Friday 08/06/07 New Young Pony Club @ Concorde 2, Brighton

Entering tonight’s venue you would be forgiven for thinking that you had in fact stumbled into a tourist souvenir shop in New York. New Young Pony Club have cottoned onto the fact that their initials ‘NYPC’ look ace with the iconic ‘I heart NY’ logo that was already popular with trendies nationwide. Stickers, t-shirts, key rings, posters and door hangers adorning the logo are everywhere which seems to go down well with the tack-friendly seaside folk that frequent this venue who give the candy striped five some a warm welcome when they appear on stage, “Your whips are in the post!” is the opening line from front gal Tahita.

On record NYPC’s sound is squeaky clean and perfectly manufactured. The live reality of the band’s sound is not so sickly sweet and some of the magic is lost by a few moments of vocal dodgyness and a certain lack of balls from the synth, however the bass is sounding sufficiently gutsy and danceable and the charisma drummer Sarah is emulating comes as some compensation.  Recent single ‘The Bomb’ kicks in three songs into the set and pushes the crowds energy levels up a notch, what follows are new songs from the forthcoming album such as ‘Tight Fit’ which don’t quite hold the anthemic pop hooks of the previous material.  Tahita’s has a soft spot for Brighton as she came to uni here, her stage presence is inarguable, however, she doesn’t really interact with the rest of the band enough until the set draws to a close with cat walk anthem ‘Ice Cream’ – the one we have all been waiting for and the crowd scream, for ice cream.

The highpoint of the night is the encore and the first time that the band seem to have let loose, which is slightly frustrating.  It’s hard to work out how much of NYPC’s appeal is in their style and gimmick and how much is in the actual substance of their music, when a band sound far better on tape than in the flesh it makes you wonder if you could have saved yourself a tenner and sent off for one of their ‘I heart NYPC’ t-shirts instead.