Live Review: The Maccabees - Capitol

Britpop's dead, but don't tell the Brits. It's Olympic year, and the marketers and publicists at Great Britain PLC are trying to sell England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland to the world. It's fortunate that there are bands like The Maccabees to carry the post-Oasis, post-Bloc Party torch for Cool Britannia, touring as far as Western Australia and Perth's Capitol. The Voltaire Twins began by launching synth-first into a wall of indie-electro and layered vocals, punctuated by tom-tom battles between Jaymes Brown and drummer Matt Giovannangelo (think The Blue Man Group re-imagined by Pitchfork). The band appeared at this year's SXSW festival in Austin, Texas and have supported big names over the past year, and the performance had both finesse and huge bolts of primal energy. Expect even bigger things as this year rolls on.

The Maccabees' lead singer Orlando Weeks wears his guitar high, curls his lip when he sings, and the girls go mad for him. He had the crowd from opener Child and all through a set heavy on material from this year's Given To The Wild, though the biggest cheers were saved for X-Ray and Lego from debut Colour It In. It was a great performance from a band with a youthful sound and look, and who strut that thin line between innocence and arrogance. It's a baffling myth, and some of the very worst 'Shit Perth People Say', that Perth is starved for live music. If I had a dollar for every time I'd heard someone moan “no acts ever come here”, I'd have enough to buy about six Facebook shares. Capitol sold well under the amount of tickets available for The Maccabees' Perth gig – no doubt a lot of fans would be catching them at Groovin' The Moo over the weekend but, even so, the club was criminally under capacity for two acts that deserved much more.