Brighton's best...
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The Dears...
review It’s a long, dark night and a bit of a bumpy ride with The Dears, so Ambulance Ltd’s unfussy songs are, in retrospect, pretty easy on the ear. These skinny boys from New York play sounds that evoke the ‘Loaded’ era Velvet Underground. The nice stuff. The sunny stuff. Each song would love to be a ‘Sweet Jane’. Rather than a ‘Sister Ray’.A few tracks into their set it appears painfully obvious to me that Montreal’s The Dears have spent many alcoholic afternoons in their rooms pondering at the altar of Morrissey. Murray Lightburn, artistic director and lead singer, is especially indebted to the former Smiths frontman, both vocally and through his attempts to imbue the group's work with a particularly melancholy philosophy: all cinematic despair, hysterical longing and overwrought sentimentality. That’s not to say that this lot can be written off as simple Smiths emulators: appearing very late in the evening, their set begins with an epic ten-minute psychedelic/funk freak-out, complete with flute flourishes; one of those keyboard things you blow into; and layers and layers of overpowering washes of shimmering synths and guitars turned up to the max. There are times when Lightburn's But I can’t ignore the fact that they can sound like Blur devotees. There are times when Lightburn’s voice appears to be channelling Damon Albarn’s croon. Underneath the sometimes unsubtle, heavy guitar work I can hear The Dears reaching for the kind of soaring ballad that characterised the Parklife era: ‘This is a Low’, ‘Badhead’, ‘To the End’ - that sort of thing. Another number begins with a delicate string-laden introduction that mimics ‘The Universal’. It’s Canadians playing Britpop, seven years late, and without the Mockney accents, innit? At times they can be a bit overblown. There’s a great deal going on in these songs. Many will start with subtlety, with Lightburn reaching for the melancholia, but will suddenly change gear as each band member gives it their all, building and building the track into a crescendo that finally stalls with Lightburn's lump-in-the-throat vocals. Subtlety and bombast. Bluster and sensitivity. It’s a feat they repeat many times. I’m not sure it always works and it undermines some of their songs. However, recent single ‘Lost in the Plot’ is the highlight of the evening, as is the single encore, ‘Heartless Romantic’. This is preceded by a darkly comic monologue, delivered fag in hand, in which Lightburn espouses The Dears’ manifesto of coming out the other side of dark days spent wandering the streets alone, wrecked on brandy, hooked on Gitanes and enjoying every miserable minute of solitude. I believe it’s dark and snows a lot in Montreal. It shows.
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