S.C.U.M
The History Of Apple Pie
Advert
Electrowerkz, London
Wednesday July 13 2011
The dear old Electrowerkz has changed a bit since the days when it was exclusively a word-of-mouth warehouse party venue for London's goths and industrio-heads.
Spruced up and renovated, the place now even has a food court, of all things. But the downstairs-front room is still a big black hangar of doom, and it's still got the same interesting acoustics it's always had.
Those sound-mangling acoustics are probably not a problem for Advert, whose fuzzily downbeat guitar-washes are fairly impressionistic at the best of times.
Tonight the band churns and fizzes under minimalist lighting, their boys next door image at odds with the brooding grind of the music.
Advert are all about sound, rather than songs - they don't have any tunes your milkman would whistle, that's for sure - and I suppose that's their limiting factor. They're picking up some plumb support slots, and I'm sure having celeb mates doesn't hurt - tonight, not only are the band using S.C.U.M's drum kit, they also have S.C.U.M's drummer in the ranks. But if they intend to move up the rankings on their own account, a catchy chorus or two wouldn't go amiss.
I approach The History Of Apple Pie with a certain amount of caution. There's something about that name that fairly screams 'Twee!' at me. And, although I admit to the ownership of one 10" single by The Pastels, I don't do twee.
Still, someone must think they're the future: the band has a deal with Rough Trade, they're managed by Hall Or Nothing, and they've made a video for their single 'You're So Cool' which features someone cavorting round desssed as an ice cream cone. (You see? Twee! ).
Trouble is, The History Of Apple Pie's top-notch industry partners and lavish multimedia promotional gambits count for nowt when it's just the band themselves, on stage in real time, in front of an audience that needs to be won over.
And, while the Pies obviously have their fans, that winning over thing doesn't quite happen for me tonight.
The band seem young and gauche in the approved indie-band manner. I find myself involuntarily looking around, expecting to see mums and dads standing on the sidelines beaming with pride as if the gig is a school concert, or something. The Pies are all dressed in instant indie-kid threads (fashion note: the lumberjack shirt is back, boys), and they make an indie-schmindie noise that coud be any female-fronted band from the Shop Assistants onwards.
It's not actively offensive in any way, but there's nothing that really pulls me in, either. I'm sure they'll go down a storm at the Indietracks festival, but I wait (and wait, and wait) for the band to drop a top tune, a killer groover that could only be The History Of Apple Pie - and I never quite hear it.
S.C.U.M, on the other hand, are all about the instantly recognisable groovers. And it seems they're getting more groovy all the time.
The band has come quite a way since their days as the surrealist situationists of the twenty-first century new wave, enticing and frightening audiences in equal measure with live sets that amounted to gleeful melodrama amid booming clouds of reverb.
These days, S.C.U.M have pushed the beat to the fore - their sound is now far more rhythmic, far more groovy, than the shuddering reverb-workouts of before.
There's still plenty of melodrama, mind, and tonight we even get a red sheet suspended right across the front of the stage, billowing like a sail in the blast of a strategically placed fan. This in itself lends an air of performance art to the proceedings. This swathe of surging fabric, right in the lead singer's way, suggests there's a spot of surrealism in S.C.U.M's approach yet. (It also, incidentally, ties the on-stage performance in with the band's 'Amber Hands' video, in which billowing fabric has a starring role. S.C.U.M don't just throw this stuff together, you know.)
Vocalist Thomas Cohen sets up a visual duet with the ever-shifting bolt of cloth, now falling into its folds, now shoving it sideways as he steps forward to lead the show from the front. Meanwhile the band lock down a fuzzy krautrock groove, 
all sweeps of keyboard colour, insistently growling bass, and those no-shit metronomic drums.
It's a bravura performance that plays with the conventions of a rock band performance even as it succeeds as exactly that. Flamboyance nailed to no-shit rock 'n' roll moxie.
Down the front, a passing Jonny Slut - no stranger to rock n' roll flamboyance himself, of course - gives his verdict. "They're preposterous!" he claims. "And they're brilliant!"
You know what? You're not wrong on either count, Jonny.
S.C.U.M: Website | MySpace | Facebook
The History Of Apple Pie: Website | MySpace | Facebook
For more photos from this gig, find S.C.U.M by name here.
Find a S.C.U.M album review here.
