White Lies / School of Seven Bells

Hype can be a fickle friend, and tonight's headliners have seen their fair share of it over the last year. It's often the way that bands that are ridiculously lauded before they've actually achieved anything can only disappoint. But similarly a band receiving criminally little of the hard-sell can delight.

Take School Of Seven Bells. From the moment their delicious harmonies envelop the room we are lost in a shimmering fog of shoegaze. 'Wired For Light' provides the highlight of a glorious set although without the staccato beats of the likes of 'iamundernodisguise', and 'Prince of Peace', the set seems to blend into one gauzy mist. Albeit a luscious one.

As we exit one band riding high on celestial enchantment, we enter another drowning in their own infectious gloom and doing it with aplomb. But White Lies' sincerity is questionable. It's obvious that from start to finish, this is a band obsessed with image. From the film noir-esque backdrop and lighting to the matching black shirts (though front-man Harry McVeigh is wearing the token white tonight like some sort of angel of death) everything about tonight is choreographed and polished with a forbidding sheen.

McVeigh has been blessed with a cinematic voice that can actually make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. And although his solemn baritone has been compared to Ian Curtis, as he does his best Midge Ure impression during the soaring moments in the likes of 'Fifty On Our Foreheads' and 'Death', its obvious his vocals can reach places that Curtis would not have dared to go, and lets be honest had no interest in going.

Because that is where White Lies greatly differ, they have an obvious Killers-esque desire for success of stadium sized proportions.

Lugubrious songs about funerals, blood and death are delivered with an almost theatrical sensibility but as with their album, the sticking point of their performance was always going to be those clunky lyrics. So desperate to appear morbidly profound, the rhyming couplets of shake/awake, skies/eyes and left/death are so contrived it's almost laughable, but then the dizzying apocalyptic choruses kick in and who's laughing now?

The obvious crowd pleasers, 'A Place To Hide', 'To Lose My Life' and 'Farewell To The Fairground' are thrown out early as the first hat-trick of songs, but if you were left thinking the rest of the show was going to be filler-fodder, think again. What's so surprising about tonight is how loud and heavy White Lies are live. We’re not talking Machine Head or anything here, but take the dark-hearted synth of 'The Price of Love', and agony of 'Unfinished Business' that literally explode amid blazes of pop euphoria and white lights. Or a version of Portishead's 'The Rip' followed by Death' that provide the perfect bitter-sweet ending.

Even though they're about as original as an X-factor contestant, pilfering the best bits of Depeche Mode, Echo and the Bunnymen, Ultravox and Tears for Fears, White Lies have an undeniable knack for making despondency sound utterly dazzling.

More often it seems that people go out of their way to write-off a band on the receiving end of the hype-machine, whether they deserve it or not. White Lies may have it all and too much too soon, but perhaps for once, the music fat-cats got it right. It's best to just succumb to this one.

FUTURE GIGS

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