Great Escape 2009: The Maccabees, The Corn Exchange
As the band flee the stage, the audience trudge back into the Brighton streets.
After a fairly tame start to proceedings there was the manic rush across the Laines to greet the Maccabees on their return home. The huge chasm of a hall that is the Corn Exchange is one of the larger venues the festival occupies by quite some distance and lacks any of the intimacy that so many others have to offer. Like Alexandra Palace’s baby sister with the bar at one end and no discerning features at all it was going to take a sound of some size to fill it without making a fist of its own melody.
Unfortunately the sound of The Hundred in the Hands isn’t quite big enough. Yet while it will never fill stadiums everything else about the set from the New Yorkers is epic. It's cool. It's an impenetrable wall of Brooklyn sound. Hailing from the ashes of the Boggs, Eleanore Everdell’s highly sexed vocals over their jagged lo-fi dance beats break into your ears like whispers of every brief attraction that you ever let slip, sailing across the dancefloor, leaving you propping up the wall.
Elements of TV On The Radio (Everdell provided the vocals ‘Lover’s Day’) and Bloc Party strike you throughout. But neither of those could provide the downright footstomping, hand-clapping boogie of this pair.
After this high-class eye opener the home crowd soon return quickly and happily to their comfort zone with the anthemic ‘No Kind Words’ from ‘Wall of Arms’ as the local lads burst immediately into their rhythm. Without pause for breath the Maccabees do their best to fill the high ceilings with a thunderous rendition of ‘X-Ray Vision’. B-side ‘Accordion Song’ and the gentle sing-a-long of ‘Toothpaste Kisses’ provide the only respite in a storming set which also includes ‘Precious Time’ and ‘First Love’. The loudest reception of the evening is saved for the set closer, new single ‘Love You Better’ bringing everything to a frantic, anxious close. Its jagged sounds almost bewildering the pogoing front rows; whose only answer is to freeze, arms raised and scream the refrain back at Orlando. As the band flee the stage the audience trudge back into the Brighton streets. The masses seem more struck by despair that the set was no longer than the allotted half hour than the fact they had probably just witnessed the highlight of the weekend, and many a band would spend the next two days trying to top it.
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