The Fiery Furnaces / The Blueskins / Mad Action - London Highbury Garage - 24/2/04
4/5
By: Cat Goodwin
If you had named your band after the greatest baseball player in the world who turned out to be highly mental and famed for beating up his own fan with a pair of crutches, you'd change it too, wouldn't you?
Yes, better to be called Mad Action than to have a baseball-bat wrapped around your head, we reckon. So went the story for unassuming duo Paul Nicgorski and Ryan Bernstein, who won both critical acclaim and BRMC approval before changing their name from Ty Cobb last year. Tonight playing songs from mini-album 'Teac Attack' with projections of themselves drumming on a white background, as MA veer between stark Jesus and Mary Chain-esque dirge-rock and more acoustic-based rambles they resemble futuristic karaoke overlords, yet somehow the songs fall flaccid. Next time they've promised to play in a box though, so we live in hope.
More out of their box than ever likely to play inside one are The Blueskins. Hailing from Yorkshire, this four-piece claim to be weed-obsessed (hence the Rizla-inspired name), but with the amount of energetic jittering onstage our guess on drugs would have been poppers. For they truly are the most energetic, young British band around; by rights, that accolade should really belong to The 22-20's but sadly their frontman Martin Trimble seems to be laden with the emotional lethargy of a brick, so the title tonight is swiped by The 'Skins. 'I Wanna Know' is basically The Beatles' 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand' having been in nu-blues therapy for assertiveness. While every other song tonight is given a quick dusting with some of The Libertines' magic power and played out with raucous and joyful abandon. Before they even know it, The Blueskins will be deftly smuggled onto the midnight-skiffle train and bound for Coral-land.
No stranger to kidnap would be headliners The Fiery Furnaces, looking as they do a modern-day indie version of Hansel and Gretel. As a brother/sister duo, there is a real air of weird fairytale and myth about them, compounded by a set full of lo-fi, childlike meandering songs which are mostly about puffins. Probably.
The Furnaces barely stop for applause during their 40-minute long set of poetry, verse and Wurlitzer bits, and there's more than the odd mention of a disturbing character named Snaggletooth. Like a jerky Patti Smith, singer Eleanor belts out 'Crystal Clear' and struts the stage like a hybrid between Mick Jagger and a lion. Rumoured to be dating Alex/Franz Ferdinand, you can also imagine the combined offspring to be a very spindly, uber-cool melodic child indeed.
When we land at infectious current single 'Tropical Iceland' - with its quirky chant of 'icy, icy' - all that's left is for Eleanor to declare in the next song a lyric which sounds disarmingly like 'the hardest thing I've ever had to do is pay my projectionists' fund.' In which case, touring again with Mad Action seems like a sensible plan. They'll do the visuals. The Blueskins can bring the drugs. Together, we can all go off on a ship to a house made of biscuits and visit some penguins. Genius.
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