Live Review | South @ Sonar 2006.03.29

British music has always been fodder for the fickle beasts that are American consumers. While Coldplay are devoured as a sugary feast and Radiohead a literate delicacy, groups from Muse to Slade have dented charts and hearts across the pond and barely bounce off college listeners, never breaking the market. Londoners South, who have grown from teens to torch-bearers, may fall into that gap, but they could represent the last great band from the twitching corpse of Brit-Pop.

In three records, South turned their teenage attention deficits from trippy electronica beeps to lush melody-forged pop gems plucked from the clouds. As the group grows on record, live they are forced to tone down to a primitive, yet well-suited end. Taking hints from model reinventionists Wilco, South boils down the layered and complex into the basic with stunning results. While the ambition of their earlier electro-tinged work often distracted from the cute simplistic melodies and daydream hooks of the songwriting trio. That core, Joel Cadbury, Jamie McDonald and Brett Shaw, can and do switch instruments without any strain on the music or their abilities. With Cadbury on bass and singing, McDonald and Shaw duel for guitar leads away from the attention-stealing bass leading finer songs by the nose (“Safety in Numbers”, “Keep Close”).

The expressive deconstruction of “Paint the Silence”, complete with hypnotic keys-as-strings, washes up and rolls back onto the chorus. “Motiveless Crime” is all rhythmic pounding, vibrating the monitors to the stage edge amid more synthetic sweeps and Cadbury’s psychedelic hush. Despite the calming effect, members of their touring party, including Margot and the Nuclear So and So and Something For Rockets dance around the audience like chocolate-stained children in an amusement park. The mania lets Cadbury chuckle briefly mid-song, as he reels back in his focus, biting his lower lip between verses. His face then fatigues, straining to get back into character as the words errupt from him.

“Shallow” exhibits their new melodic purpose defining the album it opens (Adventures in the Underground Journey to the Stars was released domestically April 4). The turn towards pop substance over the often cluttering electronics defines South as a live entity. Achieving such rapturous, blissful atmospherics, South is earning a reputation as equals to post-Brit Pop elder statesmen Doves and Elbow, and not simply their squeaky-voice younger siblings.

Blindly listing “cover song” on their set list, Cadbury and company breeze over the bristle of New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle”, the wunderkinds bisect the song for it’s pop sway early and then into club-moving slice of their roots.

The tragedy of South stumbles into the commercial void of car commercials and O.C. soundtracks would be enormous - few bands have created such a testament to their own diverse music growth and maturation towards brilliance.

Something For Rockets