Alt-J - Tramlines 2012 review

'This is the future'

Chris Swindells - 21 July 2012

The Bowery has been full for hours. One modestly sized, decadently decorated venue can’t take this sort of anticipation.

Alt-J have everything to live up to, and therefore everything to lose. At 10:25 pm our 2012 Ones To Watch enter - 25 minutes late.

Trying to replicate the intricacies of their debut ‘An Awesome Wave’ is a tough task but ‘Tessellate’ spells out their intent, its subtle and twisting verses taking a bizarre turn as half the venue take to singing along, the other half talking in irrelevant malevolence. Such is the luck for the ‘hot new thing’.

‘Fitzpleasure’ has the rabid gusto of an animal caught in the headlights, turning left and right each and every other second. ‘Matilda’ demonstrates more gentle and feminine undertones, but coalesces into a chorus of screams and sore lyrical laments for a lost love, while ‘Breezeblocks’ follows with a punch to the lungs, deadly double bass winding the chest cavity as the song pains a potent picture of unhappy home life spilling into tragedy, a deceptively mellow note for the Tramlines crowd.

Less than a year on from supporting Tubelord in the same venue, Alt-J have already outgrown  their early blogger fanbase and live, they’re more convincing than a picture of Higgs Boson waving as it navigates 4.6 G Force on Stealth at Thorpe Park.

It’s simple: this is the future, embrace it or be judged a philistine.

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