With the recent buzz that has been building up around this band, I was delighted to be asked to go and see WE ARE SCIENTISTS, just to see what all the fuss has been about. Having recently topped the NME chart with their single "The Great Escape", and with frequent airplay on a number of radio stations, it all seemed very promising.
The atmosphere was expectant and very sweaty prior to their not-so-grand entrance. Even the bar staff were shouting and wolf-whistling, giving the impression that this band had a bit of a cult following. When the crowd erupts into bouts of spontaneous applause before the band walks on stage, its a good thing. So far so good.
So eventually, after being "fashionably" late, the Brooklyn-based trio strutted onto stage and opened with an energetic, but unfortunately hideously generic set. Yes folks, we have yet another group of lads with (lets face it) Shoreditch haircuts, producing sharp-edged angular rock (pop). Yawn...
OK, so Keith Murray's (guitar and lead vocals) performance was certainly magnetic, but he sounded far too much like Brian Molko of Placebo for my liking, and once I got that into my head it took over the whole performance. I could ream off examples of who this band sound like: early U2, The Jam, The Killers, The Bravery, Editors, Joy Division, even (scarily) Blink 182 in places... You get the picture.
For the first half of the gig there was a nice sized mosh-pit at the front, which was, relatively speaking, fairly decent to say that most of the audience seemed a bit too trendy to move (their wigs might have fallen off...). Murray was throwing himself around the stage in the manner of someone being electrocuted from the feet upwards and Chris Cain (bass, backing vocals) and Michael Tapper (drums, backing vocals) were equally as revved up - and given that there was only three of them, their sound was BIG.
We Are Scientists have made themselves look "just like" scientists. The sort of scientists who wear leather arm patches and didn't get any sex as teenagers - giving them the impetus to produce music that angry pre-pubescents across the Western World will identify with no doubt. So I wasn't surprised when Murray started yelling out lyrics which repeatedly used the phrase "If you want to USE MY BODY!!!", as an almost desperate plea to any potential groupies in the audience. At this point the venue got a bit hot and there was a substantial amount of steam rising from the mosh-pit, like so many boiling kettles.
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Sadly, having started off so nicely, halfway through the set their performance became a bit more introverted and self-exclusive. All their songs sounded even more similar than before, and I got bored. I started to notice that the sound system was controlled well within EU safety limits, which is annoying when you want your ears to bleed. Then I noticed a bit of a "mid-gig-lull" - everyone had stopped moving and were heading for the bar. The guitar solos had become long and very The-Edge-esque. They didn't recover the audience after that really, and I got the impression that the audience felt there was a slight anti-climax after all the hype and expectation.
So what's the deal with this band then? Well no doubt the NME Brigade will be loving We Are Scientists for the short time that they'll be "the next big thing". They perform well in many ways, but they aren't doing anything groundbreaking, and I doubt that they'll ever show us anything different. I imagine that there will be a couple of albums that sell reasonably well, and some nice tours and festival appearances, before they disappear back into obscurity.
Franz Ferdinand were among one of the first bands to introduce us back to this 80s-orientated indie-punk music, which was groundbreaking at the time. We Are Scientists are another one of the all too common Franz Ferdinand "Me-Too" bands. I'm not going to wait for them to pull any rabbits out of the hat and come up with something that really stands out. And as good as they are, they sound the same as ever other band within this genre.
(The second We Are Scientists album, "With Love and Squalor", is available on Virgin America Records.)
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