Clean Bandit, The Laundry E8
Date: 13 March 2014 at 18:00
Venue: E8 3FN
About this gig
Their songs are brainy and bouncy: they're the Dostoyevskys of disco. They took the name Clean Bandit from a translation of a Russian phrase and two of them have lived in Moscow - Chatto went to learn the language and play cello and Jack Patterson studied film at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography, where he learned to produce, edit: all the skills the band would eventually need to make their own videos, which they now do. Their first releases were on the excellent Black Butter (Rudimental, Scrufizzer), but they've since signed to Atlantic, and they've supported everyone from alt-J to Rudimental and Disclosure. It would be too obvious to say the group - who call themselves an "electroquartet" - are the new Disclosure, and besides, that would be to undersell the classical quotient (the CQ, if you will) of their music, but then again, you needn't worry that it's going to be too stuffy. There is air aplenty in this chamber (music), and their songs are uniformly bright and breezy, melodic and sweet, from the UK funky-goes-Oriental spiciness of A&E to the forlorn lovers garage of Dust Clears. The strings are well integrated - not surprisingly considering their history - and the clever stuff is well hidden, even the "shift in the paradigm" in Dust Clears. That said, they do push it a bit on Mozart's House, which features a lexicon of classical terms plus a section of Mozart's String Quartet No 21. "So you think electronic music is boring?" asks a stern male voice on the latter. On the contrary. But shove any more Wolfgang Amadeus on your next single and the party ends here. Paul Lester - The Guardian
https://www.facebook.com/cleanbandit