Things are buzzing at the [I]Social[/I]. Hip corduroy’n’felt-clad young things mill around, impressing and admiring each other. Meanwhile, almost unnoticed on the tiny stage, two young guys from Brighton with acoustic guitars are weaving spiderweb-delicate melancholy.
What [a]Turin Brakes[/a] do is really breathtakingly simple. There are two of them. They’ve known each other since school. But this is no exercise in nostalgia for an imagined happier, easier past.
The sound of [a]Turin Brakes[/a] is the sound of innocence breaking; of cold reality cutting into trust. It’s a sound of astonishing purity shot through with the first awakenings of regret, heartbreak and all those other things we’ve learned to be cynical and ironic about in an era where postmodernism rules. Rather than being backward-looking or conservative, it’s actually pretty brave to be doing this now.
Beautiful, too, for whether honestly afraid or calmly content, it’s always reassuring and flooded with warmth. ‘The Future Boy’, despite being a paranoid vision, is exquisite in its trembling-bottom-lip shakiness.
Watch them, fall quietly in love with them, treasure them. But for heaven’s sake, don’t ignore them.