Tennis and Race Horses live review
Under Cargo’s yellow stage illumination, Patrick Riley from Tennis’ wedding ring glimmers particularly noticeably, sliding up and down the neck of his guitar as he plays. It’s almost as if he buffs it just before performing, so much does it catch the light – and he’d have good reason to, too. After all, if your band’s schtick is that you’re a married couple who bought a boat and then wrote your debut album during a seven-month honeymoon sailing together down the eastern seaboard of the United States, you better make sure everyone can see the damn ring.
But you’d also better make sure everyone can see you’re in love with each other too, which tonight is slightly more difficult to detect. Riley and his wife Alaina Moore, the spit of Dirty Dancing-era Jennifer Grey in heavy-knitted jumper and ringletted hair, are as far apart from one another as the stage will allow, and eye contact is kept to a bare minimum. There isn’t even a glimmer of fondness from Riley when Moore declares, “this one’s for Patrick” by way of introducing Pigeon, which features the affectionate refrain “I will be there/I promise to take good care of you.”
The gleaming wedding band coupled with the onstage froideur makes for awkward watching, and Tennis’ brand of simple high-school-prom makeout pop, which could be utterly charming in the hands of a more charismatic pair, sounds uncomfortably cold and jarring as a result.
Equally aloof but in a far more enticing way are opening act Race Horses, five saucer-eyed teenagers from the Welsh valleys with a sackful of Beach Boys harmonies, buzzy Super Furries keyboards and a pleasingly unusual approach to song structure. “I want to be your Lonely Hearts Club Band,” pronounces singer Meilyr Jones during one track, making his aspirations patently clear, just in case the preceding “Sisters”, with all its Lennon/McCartney-esque eccentric tangents, giddiness and clever irreverence hadn’t given enough of a clue.
There’s one serious mis-step that sees Jones jump off the stage and sing badly out of tune while beating a drum badly out of time, but it’s more than compensated by a closing seven-minute mini-symphony sung entirely in Welsh – a bold move that Tennis wouldn’t dare, even if their parochial pop didn’t preclude such imagination anyway.
