Camden Crawl, Day 3 @ various NW1 venues, London

Camden Sprint, more like... yes, this catastrophically lame observation just about conveys the full extent of my brain power following nine solid hours of jostling, beering, banding, fiddling, queuing and eughing on the streets of London's Trendy Camden. Eighteen official venues plus a healthy smattering of unofficial gig spots results in an evening not so much packed as overflowing with new music to discover and naff currently voguish indie cannon fodder losers to avoid. The replacement of an inexplicably absent Joe Lean And The Jing Jang Jong with a presumably-at-a-loose-end Drew from Babyshambles is only line-up change, we're told – say no more.

First stop is delightful goth-hole The Purple Turtle for Official Secrets Act, four massive ponces from London with Adam Ant-esque strips of gaff tape on their chiseled cheeks and thousand-yard stares like ' Nam vets. Theirs is an energetic if a little charmless noise, combining callbacks to the early '80s perhaps a tad too explicit with singer Tom Burke's erudite lyrics and undeniably attractive curl of the lip. The bar's set, and it's high enough to swing from.

Handily our next stop is next door at Koko, where Make/Model are making pretty good on 117,000 mp3 blog claims that they're knees of bees and balls of dogs hewn in the shape of Jarvis Cocker and Win Butler's terrifying Von Trapp-esque offspring. New single ‘The LSB’ does the widescreen smartpop thing with panache, and any thoughts that they're not yet as awesome as they ought to be are quashed with a curt “you are wrong and stupid” from nearby. That's me told.

Number of Steve Lamacqs spotted: 1. And now... run! The Monarch – not to be confused with the Barfly a short hop away, which of course used to be The Monarch – has undergone an impressive transformation for the weekend, its dreary interior now every inch the rock'n'roll locale. Fitting, then, that The Brute Chorus fair blow the roof off with a storming set of frazzled country blues, wry asides, impassioned chanting and the impressive moustache of lead rabble-rouser James Steel. After a spirited run through ‘Nebuchadnezzar’, they dedicate their set to absent fellow hoe-down exponents Captain Black, “who really should be part of the Crawl” - amen to that, brother.

The Electric Ballroom is impressively busy for White Lies, probably this years' biggest commercial hope and the subject of a recent A&R scramble so fevered one wonders what magic they could possibly possess. As it turns out, this sorcery proves to be comprised of nothing more complicated than “combine a bit of The Killers, Interpol's smoke-and-light show and Delays' sense of in-your-face melodic flair”. If we were looking tonight for the biggest, rather than the best band of 2009, we'd stop our search now: White Lies are impressively emphatic in their presentation, if running rather low on personality.

Number of vomiting fluoro kids on the street: 7. It's only 50 metres up the road from the Ballroom, but the atmosphere in the Underworld couldn't be more different when Lykke Li and band take the stage. A small Swede with hair like tumbleweed, she's doing her best to gee up the sea of blank faces before her. But despite Lykke's cheeky personality and pleasant lilt, the songs aren't strong enough to win her many converts – that is, until she brings onstage a UK No.1 recording artiste in the shape of Robyn, who provides giggling backing vocals to the brilliant post-pop goodness of a final song we think is called 'I’m Good I’m Gone', reading the lyrics from what looks like the back of a cereal box.

We've left it too late, and we’re pretty sure Dingwalls will be far too busy for us to get in to see Crystal Castles. Sure enough, there are loads of people stranded outside the venue, but a quick chat with a trio of despondent Frenchmen reveals that in fact the only reason they can’t get in is because, er, they haven’t got tickets. “We love Crystal Castles but we don’t want to see anyone else,” explains one Gallic chum – a familiar problem, in fact, and maybe one to be investigated by Crawl honchos for future years.

Anyway, ‘Castles singer Alice Glass seems as surprised as the photographers at the side of the stage when she squeals her first words of the evening and the crowd start flinging each other around the room like beach balls at a pep rally. We haven’t seen scenes like this since… well, since Bonde Do Role sweatily annexed the Bullet Bar at the 2007 Crawl. ‘Courtship Dating’ goes down especially well, but we’re running again to grab the final minutes of Operator Please’s set at the Barfly. ‘Just A Song About Ping Pong’ is just the fillip we need, singer Amandah leading the effervescent Aussies with what looks like (whisper it) genuine pride.

We’re just about to pop into the aftershow back at Dingwalls when a note scrawled in biro on our itinerary pirouettes into view: “Orphans & Vandals 11.30 Tommy Flynn’s”. The venue’s not part of the official Crawl, but the string-brandishing London quintet are beckoning us back down Camden High St nonetheless – and it’s immensely gratifying to report their calm triumph over all that’s gone before. Despite what ought to be a cloying, pretentious premise – looong, drawn-out songs, scant discernable choruses, a singer who favours talking over, y’know, hitting notes – they’re quietly captivating, and despite the kerfuffle at the door (involving a crying, shitfaced reveller, a member of Her Majesty’s Constabulary and the repeated phrase “he was so horrible to me!”), do much to create a beatific air of Zen calm in the room.

Why both Fox Cubs and Party Shank had left their respective buildings by the time their officially allotted stage times came around, nobody seems to know – although there were some dark mutterings about PAs stupidly being “only booked till 1am”. All the same, the night managed to end satisfactorily – not with a bang, not with a whimper but with the pleasing hum of new discovery.

Charlie Ivens

Originally published on the-fly.co.uk

Band Of Horses @ Koko, London

For all their beards, down-home authenticity and uncomplicated phrasing, Seattle-born, Carolina-based Band of Horses are the closest America’s come to creating a Coldplay – a bona fide stadium-conquering music-for-the-masses phenomenon – for quite some time.

Whether or not this is a good thing is open for extensive, shouty debate. But before you decide, hear this: just as the canon of practically all British guitar-based pop can be traced back to Lennon’s guitar sound on The Beatles’ 1963 ‘Please Please Me’ album, the US equivalent follows on, sometimes flagrantly, from its country, blues and bluegrass forebears.

When Band Of Horses singer Ben Bridwell claims, “We are the ever-living ghost of what once was” during tonight’s undeniably affecting singalong phones-aloft ballad ‘No One’s Gonna Love You’, it’s hard to argue against BOH’s potential longevity. But something deep inside is sorrowfully whimpering, “It isn’t meant to be like this.”

Band Of Horses released a wonderful album last year called Cease To Begin, a delicate and finely wrought work treading a light-footed line between The Shins and Lavender Diamond: that is, equal parts Amerindie introspection and lovelorn country catharsis. But transposed from the mp3 players and laptops of countless sensitive headphone-toting Pitchfork readers into Koko’s atmospherically unforgiving environs, glorious songs like ‘Is There A Ghost’ morph suddenly into identikit, clichéd, manipulative AM rock fare.

This may be a trick of the light, of course, the final playing out of a masterclass in music marketing in the same way Razorlight were initially sold as edgy and underground before it became clear they were every bit as cynically created as Girls Aloud and 5% as exciting. But somehow it feels Band Of Horses deserve more than this.

The festival season might see them right, of course. Just as The National, Cold War Kids and The Hold Steady have found new and admirably obsessive audiences in the summer season, there’s a fair-to-middling chance Band Of Horses will reel in fans who care. A buoyant take on ‘The General Specific’, coming in late on, is a great example of the sort of stomper that’ll cut it in the field – but it’s not exactly helped by the muddy sound obscuring most of Bridwell’s lyrics and a crowd not even pretending to affect giving much of a shit.

In theory, Band Of Horses have potential sans frontieres. But assuming they’re not (just) in it for the moolah, and assuming they’ve got a semi-hard grasp on their own affairs, they’d do very well not to fall victim to a haemorrhaging music industry’s shrinking pains. A flash in the pan they are certainly not, but what a trusted friend once referred to as a “patronising deployment of the canon” may yet be their undoing. Raise a glass to the Band not wrecking their own party.

Charlie Ivens

Originally published on the-fly.co.uk