Weaving Sonic Youth guitar snideness into the safe framework of a U2 riff with songs peppered with atmospherics from a tiny trinket box. Meet Longwave …
There is, be it fleeting or not, something unerringly sexual about our current love affair with New York. And it’s only human nature that you don’t want to overcrowd your affections, not too much. Yeah, so you might start off with good intentions and a steady partner (statistically more than likely The You-Know-Whos), but with chalices of musical aphrodisiac ten for a cent, giving rise to the floozy inside, it’s hard not to start spending an hour here and a sly night away there. We Brits may continually tarnish Yanks in general with the stereotype of excess and plenty, but we rarely get proved wrong and there is a veritable abundance on offer here. Admittedly most encounters don’t get past that stage (some, like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, may be pure dripping sex that you’d happily settle for exclusively, but do you honestly think she’d ever settle for you!?) and once the excitement bubble has burst you’ll be retreating to, at the very least, an open relationship with strict ground rules. In this existence Longwave might never be your number one, but they are potentially the bit on the side of choice.
Despite some reported kinship with their royal stylenesses The Strokes, they ain’t going to be strutting down rock n roll’s catwalk anytime shortly themselves. And for that they will obviously remain hidden from view in the shadows of the trend mags. They are gawky in their stride, a little awkward in facial expression, like rabbits in a small flashlight. Essentially a bit normal then. And while that may not win them many a cover photo-shoot, you don’t need any glossy axis of cool list or en-vogue fringe to get it. And anyhow, they still have their subtle (and y’know, given time, loveable) oddities. Front-wave Steve for instance sings like he has a satsuma in his mouth and has hair like the later stages of a volcanic eruption, somewhere between Mark Gardner from Ride, Rivers Cuomo and Sideshow Bob. And he throws himself around a space up there where he’s freefalling in his own head. Which rubs off, and at frenzied points absolutely makes up for static behaviour elsewhere on stage.
We do wonder about their sound. We wonder whether Dave’s close-to-his-chest basslines and Mike’s sharply mechanical beats (like he’s taken ‘OK Computer’ as a literal concept) end up evoking U2 bombast purely by chance (on the immense baron ‘Everywhere You Turn’ especially). Then we see Mike’s U2 t-shirt. And we wonder how they weave Sonic Youth guitar snideness so naturally into such a safe framework, peppered with atmospherics from a tiny trinket box that may or may not have fallen out of Kevin Shields’ ear. But an alarming lack of pretension in the air (obviously all sapped up by their geographical peers already) gives some kind of answer. That last single ‘Pool Song’ immediately evokes The Strokes is unfortunate, because as good a song as it is, it’s the others like previous double-A side, the morose ‘Exit’ and the void of sound ‘Ambien’, that take hold of them most when there’s a whole venue there to fill with ambience. And the good thing is you can creep home afterwards and look your CD collection in the eye without feeling awkward. But then maybe you’ll go back soon. After that, who knows…
James Berry for Crud Magazine© 2002