CSS

"LET ME HEAR YOU SAY ‘YEAHHHHHHHHHHH!’” screams pint-sized lead singer Lovefoxxx before CSS launch into 2 Unlimited’s ‘No Limits’, perhaps the most ridiculously brilliant opening to a gig this reviewer has ever seen. They’ve all got black cloths over their heads and bodies, so they can’t even see a thing, and it’s not until half way through the song, as it merges into ‘CSS Sux’ that they decide it’s time to whip them off. Welcome to the bombast Brazilian’s pantomime world.

Re-scheduled after a cancelled date last October, the early gig on a Saturday night before Rescue Rooms opens up as a MAMMOTH indie club night full of disgusting haircuts and incredibly boring people desperately name dropping the most obscure bollocks bands in a vain attempt to attain credibility in a manner that makes you want to puke all over your own face and into your ears, is a hard slot to play.

There’s also the vague sense of bitterness they didn’t bring the rest of the current NME Indie Rave tour that they’re playing along with them – every other date gets Klaxons and The Sunshine Underground too.

But despite all these things against them, CSS put on a bloody brilliant show. It’s easy to be cynical about them – over-exposure in the press, cringe-worthy lyrics that’d never pass off the tongue of a native speaker of English (example, "Lick Lick Lick My Art-tit, Suck Suck Suck My Art-hole") – but the sheer energy and excitement they conjure on stage, and the subsequent effect it has on the Nottingham crowd, who go absolutely wild, is enough to trample cynics into a flat patch of mud.

“A la la” is a perfect slab of indie dancefloor mayhem, sexy and sinister all in one. Filth is in surplus on ‘Fuck Off Is Not The Only Thing You Have To Show’ and the ridiculous ‘Art Bitch’, while ‘Music Is My Hot Hot Sex’ succeeds in being riotously cute where it fails in being innocent. In amongst their own songs are thrown over the top snippets of Missy Elliot and, perversely, the Macarena, making the entire show seem like one big party – which is a good thing, obviously.

What they mean beyond the immediate fun they cause may be irrelevant, but for CSS it is undoubted that right here, right now, they are the greatest party band on the planet, have given rave a kick up the backside and tonight they carry it all off without a single glowstick in sight. What an achievement.

FUTURE GIGS

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