REVIEW: Conventional wisdom tells us that the more anodyne mainstream music becomes, the more likely angry avengers will arrive to take the world by storm. If subversion can be measured by volume, LA band The Icarus Line could lead a punk retaliation. But in the Pod, a number of forces conspired to steal their thunder.
The first of these was The Redneck Manifesto. Pitching their lyric-less post-rock as a visceral assault, the supporting Dublin quartet combined ferocious decibels with intelligent drive. After the teensy platform (augmented with an office desk) had hosted their sinewy performance and rolling soundscapes, bassist and frontman Richard Egan thanked us for coming and just fell short of claiming the gig as his band's own. What might have appeared cheeky, however, later seemed a canny prediction.
Unassuming roadies facilitated the changeover between bands, shunning traditional soundcheck vocabulary ("one, two") in favour of a series of wailed "yeaaaahs", preparing the microphone for abuse. Some minutes later the same roadies clambered onstage, attired, like Swedish rockers The Hives, all in black with dashes of coloured ties. Here were The Icarus Line.
Like The Redneck Manifesto, the LA punks also dispensed with vocals. Singer Joe Cardamone achieved this by pneumatically screeching words through a treated microphone, making them urgent but inaudible - literally, a waste of breath. Keen to impress, the five-piece delivered a mulch of thrashing hardcore rock, energetic beats and athletic performances.
Feed a Cat to Your Cobra and a drilling And the Sad Thing Is crunched amusingly as the band members hurled themselves around, or off, the stage. A core contingent of the audience thrashed wildly at the front, but The Pod witnessed more polite nodding than fevered head-banging. Despite hailing from the city of superhighways and unused sidewalks, The Icarus Line were unusually pedestrian.
