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Darwin Deez are a charmingly inoffensive pop band whose songs have propelled them from dingy basements to mid-level stages in a matter of months. Their songs have been heard on The Inbetweeners and their show at Leeds festival played to a packed out tent. They, in short, are a band going places. A live show merely brought to attention their excellent cohesion and accessibility, however it also exposed some of their more telling flaws.
First, I had to stand through the tedious support, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs. Maybe if I was off my face on ten pints at three in the morning I would have enjoyed it more, but it was one guy hunched over a Mac pressing buttons, alternating bass and heavy beats like hot and cold in a power shower. Accompanying him were two young women dressed in stegosaurus spines who flaunted themselves at the audience – I was that bored by the monotonous drone I started going through what dinosaurs they could be. Really don’t recommend.
But then Darwin Deez came along and they are a band that will put a smile on your face. Led by their main singer Darwin, they are pop music’s equivalent of an Innocent Smoothie (before they got taken over). They often broke off from their songs to jump into dance routines, alternating '80s yoga relaxing tunes with Rage Against The Machine’s ‘Testify’ ¬– which I suppose was for all the boys there who had been dragged along by their girlfriends. Breaking into a rap that more than one of the band members joined in on was a highlight too. And their best songs – ‘Bad Day’, ‘Radar Detector’ and ‘Constellations’ are perfectly relaxing pastel-shaded pop, with lyrics above the convoluted madness of Lady Gaga and Ke$ha that had the crowd singing back every word.
However, while at their best Darwin Deez are perfect indie pop, many of their songs are a little too bland and anaemic. After a while some of them just started blending into each other. This wasn’t helped by a truly terrible crowd, many of whom were just talking to each other the whole time, taking pictures of themselves doing horrific duck faces, and generally being idiots. And that was just within my immediate vision. I have no problem with idiocy at a gig, and my idea of hell is a place where people just stand aimlessly at a music concert, but it did seem like more people were interested in upping their photo count on Facebook rather than anything else.
Overall this was a charming gig that left me humming ‘Radar Detector’ as I boarded the train back to York. Darwin Deez are summer ice cream, something that maybe didn’t hold up on a windy February evening in Yorkshire, but still a band I recommend you download for when the blues get you down.
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