Monday 04/02/08 Rolo Tomassi, This Town Needs Guns @ Carling Academy, Oxford

How awesome are This Town Needs Guns? No really. Oxford’s best kept secret this side of **** Buttons, they’ve been seeking solace under the city’s radar for far too long; had I not been to see Rolo Tomassi tonight, I’d probably never have known they were there at all. And this would be a shame. A big shame. On the offset, the most immediately striking thing is that they sound a fair bit like Chris Carrabba’s old band, Further Seems Forever. This isn’t a negative (since they are one of this writer’s favourite bands – ever); sounding most like their more acoustic, Jimmy Eat World (‘Clarity’ era) sounding works. ‘If I Sit Still Maybe I’ll Make It Out of Here’ is so tender; if there’s any emotion left in you, it will be seeping out in droves; fairytale magical melodies, swirling in front of emotionally awakened wide eyes. ‘26 Is Dancier Than 4’ is more upbeat; fiercely fast key changes and euphonious musical tinkles. ‘And I’ll Tell You For Why’ starts with off-key clapping and cumulates in mellifluous melody, perhaps more evocative of Efterklang’s totemic tinkling; perfectly pitched and quite brilliant.

As a stark contrast, Rolo Tomassi are a far cry from the tender twinkles provided by This Town Needs Guns, inhabiting a tenacious space someplace left of post-hardcore. Eva Spence is mesmerising - “A little girl out there, caught in the hands of a drowning lunatic”; her lithe limbs loll around the stage, her body is whipped into ethereal shapes, hauntingly lifted from Dario Argento’s ‘Suspiria’; whilst we revel in her jerky ballerina twists, the most damning scream projects from her diaphragm. Something as ugly as it is beautiful, but somehow makes this all so much more real. Their music is a tangled knot of emotion being dry heaved into our ear drums. Vocals as scathing as razor blades juxtaposes Casio screeches; it’s a place not quite in the realm of hardcore (Blood Brothers, Gallows, Cutting Pink with Knives) but somewhere more experimental.

With ugly sounds piercing the auditory canal, it’s much like watching a gory, thought provoking, mishmash of horror being driven furtively into the apple of your eye; the ugly remnants of the cinematic experience refusing to remove itself from the iris’s fading memory . It’s an aural infliction, and you’re too mesmerised to look away. During ‘Film Noir’, the lighting flicks violently on and off in monochromic succession and blinds us for a second, like a film shot from Sin City; “An explosion that blasts away the dull, grey years between the now and that one fiery night when she was mine.” Or something like that! You can’t go back; something has changed. “She shivers in the wind like the last leaf on a dying tree. I let her hear my footsteps. She only goes stiff for a moment... this is my kind of kill”.