MOUNTAINEERS kick off with ‘Ripen’ – no bassist, just a fellow on keyboard, meaty synth bassline with the left hand and catchy middle eastern melody with the right. This guy is the powerhouse of Mountaineers...he is also the only one who isn’t wearing a crap hat. Unfortunately, the tune is about the best one Mountaineers have. A lot of their set was catchy, or had little oddities like funny yelping parts, flashes of electronics or fuzzing vocoder lyrics, and there were a lot of different bands inside of the Mountaineers sound but somehow it was all just a little dull. The first two songs held my attention with jingly jangle guitars and pretty synthesisers; the third one took it up a notch with a thudding bassline and weird electronic vocals, a song that Air could cook up maybe...but by the fourth song, with lyrics about plastic toothbrushes, we have well and truly slipped into *gag* Indie Rock territory.
From there on out, Mountaineers sounded like Starsailor and Athlete and, well, you know...and in my book this is bad. Make no mistake; these bands really have the ability to suck the living soul out of me. The front man had that horrible introvert-cockney (he may not be a cockney) thing that Athlete do down to a tee. He was wearing a tracksuit top and a trilbie hat for Christ sake. The drummer sported a dashing flat cap.
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But the worst thing was that Mountaineers weren’t all bad – every now and again, as I started to wonder how long the beer queue was, Mountaineers would come up with something that broke through the cloying sound. One song (not introduced) had traces of Kraftwerk in it and another, ‘UK Theatre’, kicked off like the Flaming Lips with a zwizzly fairground organ tumbling around in the background but then *choke!* they somehow blew it and went back to sounding like the cruddy Charlatans.
So to wrap up, if Mountaineers can sort out their sound, ditch the indie boys and work on the forward thinking aspects of their sound, their trump card, then their next album should be something pretty interesting. Just stay away dire Indie Rock and duff hats...you owe it to yourself.
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