It takes years of dedication to excel at your instrument without even seeming to try. Chris Wilde’s technique with a cigarette is indicative of just such application. After all, it surely can’t be easy to contort your face and let your whole body shudder manically in time with the music — while all the time keeping your fag-holding arm perfectly still.
For Doloroso’s reptilian frontman, though, it’s something of a default setting. No less impressive is his ability to maintain that heavy-lidded squint that made Bryan Ferry such an object of fascination for Seventies pop kids of both genders. It turns out, however, that the latter affectation may be something of an accident. By way of introduction to Godless — a typically glacial adventure in pop-noir — Wilde confesses that he’s struggling with the seepage of hairspray into his eyes.
So whatever the suit and the eyes say, he’s not trying to be Bryan Ferry – although over this short headlining set, it seems inconceivable that there aren’t a few old Roxy Music albums nestling in his band’s record collection. As anyone who happened upon their excellent Killer Calm EP last year will attest, Doloroso are well schooled in art-pop spanning both sides of the punk divide. Shades of David Bowie and Iggy Pop’s Berlin eras assert themselves on Line the Stars Up and Always Let You Down.
Invariably, the East London quintet’s best tunes work by disorientating rather than reassuring their audience. With its piercing one-finger keyboard line, Radio Silence sounds like one of those brilliantly weird Eurovision entries in which countries such as Finland seemed to specialise at the beginning of the 1980s.
Going against the grain of received rock-crit sensibility, Face to Face carries a welcome debt to Talk Talk’s angsty synth-pop years. But this is music that benefits from a certain amount of geometric precision — and while, on record, that doesn’t appear to be a problem for Doloroso, tonight’s muddy sound occasionally conspires to make their noise sound misleadingly generic.
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In the face of technical adversity, it’s the group’s stranger songs that distinguish themselves most impressively. Just as a warped seven-inch has the effect of momentarily pulling apart the components of a familiar tune, The Hex benefits from Andy West’s wonky counter-melody. On a winter evening, you wouldn’t exactly call it heart-warming fare. However, Doloroso’s fantasy world of minor-chord portent and elliptical lyrical stand-offs was never meant to be one of happy endings. A triumph of style over substance is a triumph nonetheless.