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Ambulance sound like a record collection. They sound like what someone’s records would be like if they weren’t just played together but were sorted and filed in some system you couldn’t work out. Messed up, with gaps everywhere, comprehensive, idiosyncratic and personal. Annoying and exasperating, but touching and hinting at some kind of key to your personality. They’re annoying and exasperating like not being able to find a record you thought you owned rather than like owning a record you didn’t want. They make you listen to other stuff. They’re confusing in a good way, leaving you standing, like a best friend would, like a relative would. They’re much more human than any other music being made now. They make you use ‘annoyed’ and ‘exasperated’ as real compliments because saying they are AMAZING just seems so obvious.
And then they’re not exasperating at all. And they sound like two record collections, three record collections, four. At their best, the four feelings teetering on the edge, captured in the strobe light, make something more transient and more lasting. At their best they are quite simply completely and utterly unlike any other band. If there is a better band in the country right now then I really, really, really want to disagree. This was the first time they’ve played their "hit" cover of '21 Seconds'. They haven’t played in eight months. And they still seem mind-blowing. Maybe this was the most concise, the most tight, the most "pop" that they’ve ever been. Great things should happen.
But it’s worrying to think that they won’t. At the moment, if Ambulance released the album they’re working on – which sounds great from the bits I’ve heard – and then split up, they would be kinda "legendary". In the way that someone like Rocket from the Tomb - a favourite of Adam, the one with the headband - are legendary. People would talk about them in "if only" terms while secretly loving the fact that they never had the chance to be defiled or claimed by anyone else. Someone like RPM would re-release the album, or put out an Ambulance compilation featuring The Static Waves (Dom’s band that Adam and Graeme produced and the guy playing glockenspiel tonight is in). But, again, that wouldn’t do them justice. Ambulance would almost certainly be better the bigger they got. Maybe they would benefit and suffer from the Ladytron thing. DJing after Ambulance, Reuben and Danny were amazing but, for a night so mixed up and Catholic, it seemed like they had a ‘style’. An eclectic style, but a style nonetheless. Sure, they were still incredible fun, but following Ambulance and having a distinct attitude and taste that people can latch onto, it seemed, well, predictably unpredictable. But it was still perhaps one of the best DJ sets I’d ever danced to. And I really mean that.
But, whatever, it’s galvanising and white-knuckled to see how people deal with Ladytron as they show quite how big they are. To see how they get pigeonholed, then deprecated, then eulogised, simply because people don’t seem to be able to ‘get’ them. It’s enthralling to watch. And I want this for (and from) Ambulance. I want to see people misunderstand them and write hagiographies and not be able to dance even though they really want to and be forced to dance even though they really don’t. They would feed off everyone watching and I can’t help thinking that, if only four bands were to try and copy them, we’d have something phenomenal on our hands.
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