Review: The Great Escape (Thursday)

As I was working at the conference this year I didn’t have time to review each day’s events as they happened, so I’m doing it now instead. I will put all my photos in an album and link to it when I’ve finished posting the reviews. First up are my thoughts on the acts I saw on Thursday:

Soft Toy Emergency
A new electro-pop group with a female lead singer. They’ve got some good songs but I’m not sure if they’re special enough to stand out and become big stars, even with the current electro-friendly climate. Nonetheless I recommend them to anyone who likes a bit of trendy, bouncy electro-pop.

Rosie & the Goldbug
They started quite late because of a technical problem, which Rosie blamed on the band who played before them, threatening to cut their brakes so they would die on the way home! One of the band members was behind me in the audience so I suggested that he might want to hide. Once they finally got going, they were pretty good, but Because You Said So (one of my top singles of 2008) was by far the standout track.

The Pipettes
This was the third time I’ve seen The Pipettes live, but each time has been a different line-up and Gwenno has been the only constant. It was great to hear the new songs again and I can’t wait to get the album. Hearing Pull Shapes at the end I realised that none of the songs are quite up to that level, and in a way the extreme brilliance of that song could be their downfall because even though their new songs are uniformly excellent, whatever they release as the first single will be compared to Pull Shapes.

Amazing Baby
I hadn’t heard any of Amazing Baby’s songs before, but for some reason the name seemed to me to suggest a cute American twee-pop band with a girl singer. Unfortunately, that description does not fit Amazing Baby at all and they were quite rubbish. Definitely not amazing!