I Was A Cub Scout / YouNoGoDie / The Crooks

A brief flick through the pages of most of the music press at the start of the year would have seen you stumble across the name I Was A Cub Scout. The young duo have been hotly tipped for big things in 2007 so I thought it was only right that I checked out their live show at this, one of the first dates on their large UK tour.

Arriving at the venue I was pleasantly surprised to see The Vic nicely filled with an expectant crowd rather than the handful of regulars the venue is sometimes guilty of attracting. So far so good, a hotly tipped band, an impressive turnout for a Sunday night and a nice pint of beer. However when the first band took to the stage it was apparent that this gig wouldn’t be quite as perfect as I had hoped.

The Crooks are the result of reading the NME too much. They sound like every bad guitar band of the last five years and to be honest I found it hard to find a single original idea in any of their songs. Every single introduction sounded like it had been lifted directly from a book of rock clichés and the songs continued with a depressingly dull NME pastiche. The Crooks are not a band you need to see.

Up next were YouNoGoDie, a band well known around the local Derby scene and recently played on Radio One by Huw Stephens. They were a great improvement on what had gone before, though to be honest, watching your mum and dad have sex would have been a more enjoyable experience than The Crooks. YouNoGoDie’s refreshing and energetic songs were reminiscent of Fugazi at their best and musically could not be faulted. There was room for improvement however with the lead singer’s vocals which seemed to hit the wrong note a little too often, however this is rock ‘n’ roll not Pop Idol so all is forgiven!

When I Was A Cub Scout arrived onstage it became apparent just how young they are; it surely cannot have been that long ago that their band name would have had to be I Am A Cub Scout. Despite their tender years the East Midlands duo started their set confidently and only a few songs in they unleashed their new single 'I Hate Nightclubs' – a sentiment I can only agree with. It is one hell of a song and deserves to dent the charts with its enthralling mix of electro indie pop and vocals that sound like they’ve been taken directly from an adolescent Jimmy Eat World track.

The gig continued with the feel of an indie disco helped out by a large dollop of decent emo, none of your My Chemical Romance rubbish here. William Bowerman’s drumming was an impressive sight and on several occasions the drumstick would fly out of his grasp such was the intensity of his tub-thumping. Frontman Todd Marriott was full of youthful energy and exuberance and channelled this into a passionate performance complete with gyrations around the rather compact stage.

The band breezed through their collection of synth led songs at a startling rate and the show, much like England’s run in an international football tournament, was finished far sooner than the fans would have hoped. After a mere thirty minutes Marriott announced that 'Pink Squares' would be their final song of the night.

'Pink Squares' is a song that deserves to be played at club nights all over the country with its infectious melody and sing along chorus. It’s the kind of song I can imagine record companies demanding to be re-released when the band make their inevitable dent into the mainstream and thus was a great way to end the night.

I Was A Cub Scout clearly have something about them and are beginning to make people sit up and notice. Their credible disregard for genre as they hop around from indie to pop to emo and dance means they have found a niche in a rather flooded market, with their only real soundalike peers being The Postal Service. With a bit more experience and a longer set length I can only see these guys heading for bigger venues and even more critical acclaim, I just hope The Crooks don’t follow them.

FUTURE GIGS

sorry, we currently have no gigs listed for this act.