Nicholas Murgatroyd

Metronomy: 21st September 2011, The Cockpit, Leeds

If Metronomy are disappointed at having missed out on the Mercury Prize to P. J. Harvey, they fail to show it in this frenetic, joy-inducing set. From the chugging guitar and swelling keyboard of hypnotic opening track ‘We Broke Free’, it’s clear that this band that started as a one-man outfit recording in a bedroom aren’t going to be satisfied with simply going through the motions. The pleasure they have in both the music and the chance to perform it to an audience is there for everyone to see, and rows of bobbing heads suggest the pleasure’s contagious.

After ‘Love Underlined’, the set moves from current album The English Riviera to ‘Back on the Motorway’ from earlier effort Nights Out. This pattern is repeated for the rest of the night, but never gets tired. Instead, it encourages you to see links between tracks that might previously have seemed disparate: the haunted vocal of ‘She Wants’, a terrific slab of English surrealism, finds its echo in ‘Heartbreaker’, while the wistful ‘The Bay’ segues perfectly into ‘A Thing for Me’. The stand-out track of the night is, perhaps unsurprisingly, ‘The Look’, with the whole room dancing to its seaside organ riff, though the encore of ‘Radio Ladio’ comes close.

This is dance music that defies its genre, not only in the energy of its live performance (superbly marshalled by the uncannily metronomic Anna Prior on drums), but also in its insistence on lyrics that require more than a millisecond’s (sober) attention. This British tour is now all but sold out, with only a few tickets remaining for their one-off show at the Royal Albert Hall, but with performances like these, it’s a pretty safe bet that Metronomy will soon be playing to such large venues from now on.

(Metronomy play Manchester Academy 2 on 26th September)

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