Summer Camp w/ Spectrals – The Lexington, London 08/04/1

Spectrals represent the most brilliant of enigmas: Just how it is possible that Louis Jones – all of a tender twenty years old – can knock up such a sophisticated take on surf-tinged sixties garage rock? While his contemporaries up there in Leeds appear to be doing an entirely different thing, Jones is currently peddling the most compelling new music I think I’ve heard in the last twelve months.

I’ve seen Spectrals play three times and there’s been a rapid development in their sound. While it’s garage rock at the core, there’s a much shinier and sophisticated surface. The vintage sounding production of their few releases to date is absent live and replaced by a poppier edge, which is no bad thing. They even take a Billy Childish song and make it entirely their own.

What Spectrals share with tonight’s headliners Summer Camp is a defining streak of nostalgia – but if Spectrals hint toward the future of rock n roll, can we say the same for Jeremy Warmsley, Elizabeth Sankey and the future of pop?

Much has been blogged and forumed regarding Summer Camp’s origin story; how the duo dared to create some fake Swedish band to cruelly trick the public. See it as cynical marketing or the fun birthing story it likely is – Sankey and Warmsley don’t appear to be infused with the DNA of Malcolm McLaren (RIP) but little more than two souls genuinely in love with reinventing the summer tinged pop sound. And then a musical dunce decided they were ‘chillwave’ or something.

This is the band’s first ‘official’ show – as I write this very sentence their debut 7″ has only been available a matter of days. I was at an early ‘unofficial’ show back March and although they didn’t blow me away, there was something gleefully loose and ramshackle to their performance. While there was evidence of a band in the early stages of honing their live show, it was more endearing than amateur and an encouraging portent for tonight’s show.

Of course, what Summer Camp have against them is the weight of expectation and a fair few industry folk are in the crowd tonight for this sell-out show on the strength of their current myspace tracks and the workings of the hype machine. By anyone’s reckoning such factors make it hard for projects whose genesis is written through these electronic channels to succeed effectively – when these new-band ‘baby-steps’ have to be taken in such a public and judgemental arena, matching these expectations is nigh on impossible.

So while Summer Camp don’t quite succeed in reproducing the magic spark that runs through the polaroid edges and analogous nooks of songs like ‘Ghost Train’, that song still manages to be the highlight of their set. The harpsichordal unpeelings and Sankey’s Laurie Anderson-like repetitions that spew from my radio alarm clock each morning this last month are a pleasure to hear live – it’s less lo-fi and sepia-tinged tonight but still a strong and unusual piece of pop music.I’m actually quite in love with the song if the truth be told.

Elsewhere, ‘Round The Moon’ playfully sets Warmsley’s gruffer vocal and a chugging Jah Wobble-y bass against Sanky’s sultrier tones. They duet again on ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ which actually sounds much better in its live incarnation – it’s a more organic and faster take on the song.

The big surprise of the evening for me is simply how well they prove themselves as a developing proposition. They are weightier and sound more like a cohesive band unit – less embryonic than the last time I saw them with Sankey visibly more comfortable as a stage presence. Her confidence even appears to grow in the short space of the set. By the time they hit the encore, Sankey has also hit an effusive stride and leaves the stage looking charged and satisfied.