The last time your reviewer was at Cyprus Avenue was to witness an occasionally magnificent, but largely gruelling and ear-splitting set from Brighton indie favourites British Sea Power. The place was packed, the sweat was crawling from the walls and the foliage BSP literally draped from the PA was sucking the air from the room.
So it's a feeling of deja vu tonight. The place is rammed, expectations run high and another potentially significant bunch of serious indie contenders from across the water come with their reputation preceding. Bar the lack of trees, the only difference in the script is the couple directly in your reviewer's line of sight who have decided this is as good a place as any to make out. But hey: who says you can't transfer that good old Glastonbury spirit indoors with the evenings drawing in, huh?
Besides, it's still not enough to detract from the fact there's some fine music ricocheting around the room tonight. And not only from the headliners. Indeed, Limerick quintet VESTA VARRO give the main attraction a fair old run for their money with their intense, brooding and adrenaline-fuelled set. They come brandishing debut single "Blue Mirror Boy" (produced by no less than Crowded House's Nick Seymour) and have the brash confidence to wheel it out within the first five minutes. It rides along beautifully on clipped guitars and is never less than snappy, dark and impressive.
It's a testament to VV'S strength and depth that most of their set retains the high standard, too. Both "Sleeping Song" and "Planes For Pilots" are big, expansive and deadly and while they work broadly in a Coldplay/ Radiohead arena, Vesta Varro's twin-cam guitar sound and inherent punky aggression ensure they remain very much their own men. Smaller details, too, are favourable, like the fact one of their guitarists looks uncannily like a young Will Sergeant and even plays some similarly hollow, screechy lead breaks on one song.
They close with the epic "In My Headlights" (well, that's the pummelling refrain anyway) and pump it up so much they don't want to let go of the refrain. It's the one place where perhaps they try a little too hard, with their vocalist spazzing out, grabbing the air like Thom Yorke drowning in quicksand and frankly over-doing the Michael Stipe-style loudhailer bit. This writer could do without the cod-metal crescendo as well, but I guess a hungry crowd like this is enough to bring out the arena aspirations in anyone, and to be fair Vesta Varro deliver and deserve the attention of this highly appreciative crowd, so we can forgive 'em the odd wrinkle at this stage.
Such is the excitement whipped up by the success of their debut album "The Back Room" and two resonant Top 20 singles, that serious Birmingham boys EDITORS come onstage to a heroes' welcome. In fact, so omnipresent have they been in the press of late, that you tend to forget they are in many ways still a band with much to prove who are actually making their Cork debut tonight.
Not that they outwardly display any kind of pressure. Indeed, tonight they play with the kinetic intensity and reserves of power that come from playing hundreds of gigs in quick succession and proceed to actually justify why they have taken on the mantle of the wider media's young men in black most likely to succeed.
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Admittedly, they look the part. With his severely-cropped hair and neat, regulation black shirt, singer Tom Smith looks appealingly vulnerable under the spotlight, though he's not averse to the occasional OTT pose and has a habit of thrusting his black Telecaster behind his head for effect. Lead guitarist Chris Urbanowicz enjoys similar flights of Hendrixian showmanship, though mostly he flits in and out of the shadows, giving it some dark'n'handsome and making the crucial melodic running with his Rickenbacker. Bassist Russell Leetch, meanwhile, is the very epitome of the solid, reliable and inventive bassist and drummer Ed Lay is mostly a blur of sticks and limbs, but doesn't put a foot wrong all night.
Of course, superficially Editors bring us nothing we haven't heard before. Anyone of this reviewer's vintage (and he's not alone in this crowd) will be able to feel restless ghosts of great, long-dead bands like The Chameleons and The Sound flitting around when they hear Editors in full flight. Yet crucially Editors have enough panache and intuition to wring an emotional storm of their own from these moodily tried'n'tested guitar squalls, and while they are writing material of this calibre they won't go far wrong.
They play significant chunks of "The Back Room" and weak links are tough to detect, yet it's still the persuasive brilliance of their three singles that provide the most illustrious thrills tonight. The metronomic precision of "Blood" comes early on; the perpetual motion excitement and all-out sensory assault of "Bullets" finds Tom and Chris losing themselves in the visceral reverie and the much-demanded "Munich" comes over all muscular and nervy, with its' memorable refrain ("People are fragile you know...be careful what you put them through") sung with quivering compassion by an emotional Smith.
Your reviewer's been around too long to put much stock in all the usual 'new Joy Division' bollocks that always follows dark and broody guitar slingers around, especially when it's tagged onto dolts like The Departure. However - like the aformentioned British Sea Power (on record at least) - Editors appear to have dotted all the i's and crossed the t's where rich, resonant and anthemic rock is concerned and have it in them to leave their individual stamp on rock's parchment in years to come.
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