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No-one could accuse The Crimea of not having earned their rock ‘n’ roll stripes. Despite a succession of support slots for the likes of Keane, Kings of Leon and Ash; and being championed by the late John Peel as far back as 2003, the indie five-piece have been left out to graze in a musical wilderness for the past few years. Thankfully, all that is about to change and 2006 looks set to be a fantastic year for The Crimea. With their well-received debut album Tragedy Rocks (one of the albums of 2005 in London’s Evening Standard, despite being relatively unheard of), a top 40 hit single, and a handful of sell-out headlining gigs, the band’s notoriety is rapidly gaining momentum. The proof is in the pudding however, and tonight’s sell-out out gig at London’s 100 club gives the band a chance to justify their hype in front of a music-savvy crowd.
A cross between the inside of an Amsterdam brothel (er...or so I imagine) and the kind of gentlemen’s club of days gone by, the venue’s seedy, smoky ambiance is the perfect setting for a band like The Crimea to cut their musical teeth. Walking onto the stage under a cloak of darkness, it’s only when Davey MacManus steps forward into the focus of an eerily blue strobe light that the audience first catches a glimpse of the band’s eccentric frontman. “We’re just a bunch of Buffalo, who’re getting slaughtered,” laments MacManus, as the shrill guitar hook of ‘Baby Boom’ gets underway. For those of you who have not formally introduced to The Crimea’s penchant for profound and deeply imaginative songwriting, the band can more often than not be found filed under ‘B for bizarre’, along with the likes of the Flaming Lips and Pavement. MacManus can certainly coin an arresting phrase, as on ‘Howling at the Moon’, where the singer philosophises “On a scale of one to ten, let’s pretend that life’s a six or seven.” It may really just be a load of pretentious old claptrap, but it’s enjoyable claptrap nevertheless.
Elsewhere, ‘White Russian Galaxy’, the album’s heaviest offering, livens things up with its pounding Stooges-esque guitar riff while ‘Bad Vibrations’ takes the mood back down a few pegs with its dizzy, infectious melody. With the current buzz surrounding the band’s debut, you’d have thought that the majority of tracks featured would have been hung out for a live airing. Surprisingly, this didn’t seem the case tonight and only about half of the album was performed. Instead, the set was littered with a host of weaker songs unknown to myself, and, judging from the audience’s indifference, them also.
Thankfully, the band managed to redeem themselves during the performance of their final two songs; the first being a spot-on cover of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Everywhere’, while concluding with the doe-eyed and totally tripped-out crowd pleaser, ‘Lottery Winners On Acid’. Its twinkling glockenspiels and lovelorn lyrics left you heading home with exactly the kind of warm and fuzzy feeling that the song sets out to describe.
