Cold Cave – The Lexington, London 05/04/2011

Did somebody book support act Drumcunt as a joke? Mention of their triumphantly adolescent name might prompt immediate titters, but the fact they’re three cherubic teenage girls trading in bucolic, close-harmony medieval folk madrigals comes as more of a sho… oh OK, they’re actually two male studenty types in trucker/baseball caps, dicking about with CD decks and a laptop (with “cunt” scrawled on it, natch), spewing out beer-stained dubstep and dark-as-the-third-Saw-movie doom metal and occasionally chatting with mock menace over the top. Well really, what did you actually expect?

The night’s organiser tells us post-gig that they didn’t want “just another electro act” supporting the mighty Cold Cave, so I suppose they succeeded by that measure. Trouble is, for all their valiant efforts to convince London otherwise, that might be exactly what Cold Cave are. But why is this? It’s not as if the songs aren’t present and correct, and at least half the five-piece band are giving King’s Cross as much gusto as they can muster.

Promise arrives early with ‘Youth And Lust’, complete with dispassionate backchat from the classy female bassist – coming on like an affectionate Gang of ‘84 pastiche, a punk-funk ‘Vienna’ – and makes promises the rest of the set finds it hard to keep. In singer Wesley Eisold we have a man clearly in some awe of Iggy circa The Idiot, of Bowie around the same time period, and of his own genius.

But we’re now living in a post-James Murphy universe, and if the punishingly self-aware LCD Soundsystem frontman has taught us anything, it’s that simply aping your heroes in style and content ain’t enough: you need to add a generous slice of self as well. ‘Catacombs’, from occasionally diverting new album Cherish The Light Years, mingles the drums from ’Modern Love’ (yes, The Dame again) with New Order’s drive – the energised keyboard player is making up for Wesley’s inertia – and Morrissey’s studied melancholy. That’s three ticks, of course, but where are Cold Cave in all this?

‘Confetti’ arrives and the night takes a turn for the shadowy, the bass vibrating our organs while a hypnotic keyboard does its best to burrow into our darker recesses. We’re only two histrionic steps from The Sisters of Mercy’s goth-doom, but really this is territory The Presets have pretty much made their own in recent years.

There’s plenty of smoke on stage, so perhaps that’s why we can’t see the mirrors. As a wasted post-teen idol Wesley’s got just the chops – the haunted air of a doomed bedroom poet, reading Baudelaire while striking anguished poses – but while Cold Cave may tilt at Soft Cell’s filthy allure they seldom scrape past The Dandy Warhols’ irony or The Cure’s over-wrought angst.

If anything, tonight reveals Cold Cave as the electro-Placebo – as essential a part of any era’s musical canon as boys in leather keks, midriff-baring pop tarts and “interesting” hair, if only to give depressed teens someone to believe in till uni. However, there’s an unavoidable feeling that we’re not watching a fresh new band as much as witnessing the slow-burn exorcism of one man’s fetish. Whatever cocksure assurances Cold Cave’s recent recorded material might offer – and for all Wesley’s valiant attempts to strike inventive poses and exude an air of superior mystique – on this occasion it just isn’t enough to convince.