Caught Live: Everything Everything @ The Academy, Manchester (NME Awards Tour 2011)

Last Friday night's NME Awards Tour show must have been a weird one for Manchester's Everything Everything. The art-rock weirdos were on home turf, and yet still found themselves second-from-bottom in the lineup, sandwiched ahead of NME’s latest 'great white indie hope' band, The Vaccines, and behind two electronic artists at the top of the bill – dubstep's first supergroup, Magnetic Man, and perennial eardrum-baiters Crystal Castles. A home town gig, then, but perhaps not quite a home town crowd.

Thankfully, though, from the moment the band walked out, picked up their guitars and launched into debut single 'Suffragette Suffragette', they were treated to a (local) heroes' welcome. The close-to-full Academy crowd jumped around, clapped enthusiastically and even - rather unexpectedly - sang along. Despite the inaccessible and often challenging nature of the band's sound, there seemed to be a clear understanding of just what Everything Everything are about; band and audience were well and truly on the same wavelength, with songs like the (deliberately?) awfully-named, but great-sounding, 'MY KZ, UR BF' going down especially well.

Banter was kept to a minimum ("It's nice to be in the city where we live...") throughout the band's brief, seven-song set - a wise decision given that the ambition and bombast displayed tonight by the likes of 'Qwerty Finger' and the set-closing 'Photoshop Handsome' were more than capable of doing the talking. 'Tin (The Manhole)' has seemingly taken on many new shapes since the band recorded it, and tonight it sounded little short of rollicking; 'Schoolin'''s dance-inducing beat, meanwhile, certainly did a good job of loosening limbs ahead of the headliners' electro assault.

They may not be quite as envelope-pushing - or, for that matter, as good - as certain excitable scribes would have you believe, but there can be little denying that these guys bring something decidedly different to the indie party. Everything Everything are a band that combines quirkiness with pop, brains with brawn, dance with rock. Happily, the end result is something that both NME and Ragged Words readers can enjoy - no mean feat in these uncertain, Good Charlotte-afflicted times.

Setlist:

1) Suffragette Suffragette 

2) Qwerty Finger 

3) Schoolin' 

4) Final Form 

5) MY KZ, UR BF 

6) Tin (The Manhole) 

7) Photoshop Handsome