As with every year, the start of 2010 rings to the cacophony of tipped, polled and buzzing new bands. One band that ducked much of the hoopla, however, are Erland & the Carnival, a new-ish outfit with a very old soul who probably couldn't be less on-trend for 2010.
The Carnival's Wicker Man-in-a-polo-neck sound comes from mixing folk music, American garage psychedelia, analogue wiggery and the cinematic gallop espoused recently by the Last Shadow Puppets. Erland Cooper and his four fellow carnies confess openly to rewriting, interpolating, and updating the work of others as the folk tradition allows, putting their sonic stamp on wildly disparate sources. Their set's pop highlight, "Trouble in Mind", started off as a blues song collected by Alan Lomax. The Carnival's take swings along stylishly before touching on the old spiritual, "Go Down Moses". A heady fug of analogue keyboards and blazing effects pedals makes it strange and hypnotic.
You'll have heard guitarist Simon Tong. A precise and unshowy enabler of British rock, he's been in the Verve and the Good, the Bad & the Queen. With taut drummer David Nock (who figured on Paul McCartney's dance side project The Fireman), this Carnival could be a smug roll call of hip old lags if it weren't for their frontman. Twentysomething Orcadian singer Cooper bestrides the stage like some Viking bard airlifted into the 1960s: black-clad, faraway-eyed and toting a worn vintage electric guitar. He's got a sonorous voice, never overshadowed by the rich racket swirling expertly behind him.
Art inspired by the romance of the carnival is easy prey to cliché, and the galumphing extremes here are no exception. Perhaps their musicianship is a little too swish, too, for the old, weird Britain they are trying to reanimate with jolts of electricity. But they have undeniable allure.
At the other end of the time-space-buzz continuum are Chew Lips, whose debut album, Unicorn, is also out tomorrow. They've been bigged up since the start of last year; indie totty Mathew Horne is in the audience.
In the near-pitch blackness, two tall skinny men, James Watkins and Will Sanderson, crouch over bits of gear on the upper tier of the Hoxton Hall stage while frontwoman Tigs lollops around the front. Clad in a gold dress, she overlays their fizzing digitals with her aerated vocals. The idea, you imagine, is Blondie backed by Simian Mobile Disco, but sadly it doesn't quite pan out.
It's hard to pinpoint what the problem is. "Slick" – a wistful discoid confection – is their best bet for a hit, and tonight, on the slow-built climax, the boys festoon Tigs with sampled "ahs" and nearly achieve lift-off. But the definitive epiphany never quite arrives. Perhaps their shortcomings stem from being neither club flesh nor pop fowl. Chew Lips are trying to do intelligent, un-obvious digital pop, distinct from all the other Little Bootses out there. But somehow they are stymied by having too commercial-sounding a singer. Sometimes the weight of all that tipping can backfire a little.
