The Answering Machine – Club Academy, Manchester 26/11/09

It’s been a great year for The Answering Machine. After four years of incredibly hard work, they’ve released one of the year’s best albums in Another City, Another Sorry, spent a month-long residency in New York and probably played more shows than I’ve had hot dinners. Tonight’s gig in Manchester was billed as a homecoming for the band, after their months of extensive touring, and it certainly felt like everyone was in the party spirit as I walked into the Academy.

First up were unsigned Sheffield band The Crookes. After their three jubilant performances at Manchester’s In The City festival in October, I was expecting a much larger crowd to turn up to watch them, but the room was surprisingly not even half-full. It was a shame, as they were brilliant. Although they still come across as quite shy on stage, their songs have the potential to become something much bigger than a support slot staple. Tunes about Parisian rivers have never sounded as good as the jangle-pop brilliance of ‘By The Seine’.

Post War Years sounded a bit like Foals, or rather Foals if they had lived up to the expectations that everyone had for them. Rather than incessant yelping, a boring generic guitar sound and general samey-ness, they took the whole electronic-post-rock ideal beyond the usual two-dimensional, fashion pap that comes out of East London with some blisteringly good samples and edgy, fast-paced vocals.

By the time The Answering Machine came on, the crowd were in very high spirits. This was probably down to the fact that both young (VERY young) and old were excited to be out on a school night. Anyway, without further ado they played old favourite ‘Lightbulbs’ with a new vibrancy, as if they were really happy to be on the stage. Indeed, it was a mood that passed through the whole set- the giddiness of ‘Oh Christina’, the shouty angst of ‘Cliffer’ and the sure-to-be classic ‘Oklahoma’ got everybody singing along and dancing like the world was going to end tomorrow.

All too soon, it was nearly going home time and the band’s set had to come to a close. However, they weren’t going to leave us all without an encore, returning to the stage with the brilliant ‘Obviously Cold’, a tune which deserves some kind of award for the genius, ambiguous lyrics which means a song about messy one-night stands is perfect pop for the under-sixteens.

Welcome back Team Machine, Manchester’s missed you.