Myspace's 'Bleep Bleep'€™ Tour: Hadouken!, Ali Love, Pull Tiger Tail

Hadouken!

Leeds Cockpit
Live Review

'Bleep bleep ah uh ah uh a yeah a wha a bleep bleep a bleep beep weeeeeeeeeeh' is the sound of tonight. In a whirlwind of neon and electronic squeals, the ‘bleep bleep tour’ stresses the two defining features of today’s new music: myspace and nu-rave. It is flaunted just about to the limits of remaining hip.

As we all don bright orange myspaz t-shirts and find new ways to customise glow sticks, Hadouken! enter to their hometown crowd. The only member of the band proud to admit to giving anything more than a fuck about what ensues is lead singer James, who comes across with an x-factor contestant cockiness, much like that which spews from the pores of Just Jack. He isn’t cool but the subversive intensity of Hadouken!’s sound makes all surroundings, reservations and any sobering realism of the night irrelevant. The outstanding highlight is a vicious rendition of ‘That Boy That Girl’ that accentuates and blows out each warped ringing of toned grime, and by ‘The Bounce’ and it’s suspect rhetoric “don’t give up your day job, day job”, we’re all thrilled.

While Hadouken! played the crowd with their slightly kitsch urban overacting, Ali Love gave a convincing portrayal of what would happen if Dan Gillespie of the Feeling did an electro solo project based on the music of Blur. If it ever happens, (which is admittedly unlikely), be sure to keep away. Despite Ali Love’s efforts, all the tight pink jeans in the world could not have saved the one-man showman from being a gimmick.

Finally Pull Tiger Tail dimmed the lights and played out the rest of the evening. Typically the firm crowd favourites did much of their bidding for them, including ‘Animator’ and set closer ‘Let’s Lightening’, but the band did well to shake up what were essentially ordinary tunes, courtesy of drumming that Bloc Party’s Matt Tong would have been proud of. The tiger masks put on by the crowd at the start soon seemed out of place and pretty much showed what the performance was missing; anything rousing or wild. It was pulling the tail of a dog, not a tiger. ‘Bleep bleep’ was not what myspace had promised us, but then are Tom and his hundred million friends just a flash in the pan themselves? New music will live on. Check out all these bands on the Camden Crawl in London next month.

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