Gig review: The Reflectacles, Hotel Utah San Francisco, 11th September 2011

Being a serious music fan can be as frustrating as it is rewarding. Great bands are like buses. Really, really slow buses. You can go weeks, months, sometimes even years, without discovering something that truly inspires you. Then the inevitable glut as two, maybe even three whole bands worth their salt come along at once. You can see plenty of gigs, listen to heaps of albums, but it’s only every so often that something ‘clicks’. Sometimes – more often than not – it’s a purely personal reaction. But sometimes it’s more objective than that.

Sometimes you have the incredible good fortune to pick a gig from the myriad selection on offer in a cosmopolitan city like San Francisco, say, purely based on the name of the band, and go along to a random venue you’ve never heard of, that turns out to be intimate and unique, and sometimes despite appearing to be the only paying customers there, you witness a band who the world need to hear. Sometimes, you approach them after the gig to drunkenly exclaim that they’re ‘amaaaaazing’ and ‘soooo good’ and make a total arse of yourself. But sometimes you wake up the next morning and forget about them, then find their demo CD in your bag a couple of weeks later and spin it in your car, expecting to find that it really doesn’t match up to being in a cool bar in San Francisco, tipsy on cheap beer and high on life and that that band you thought HAD to be the next big thing, really aren’t all that, and that they sound no better than the average folk rock band you might encounter in YOUR town, drunk, on a Sunday night.

And sometimes, just sometimes, you find you’re completely wrong.

Sometimes, you think you’ve probably discovered something really special.

Sometimes you should stop saying sometimes.

I’ll start at the very beginning. I won’t stay there long, because it's not always a very good place to start. In this case it was, without wishing to be cruel, appalling. I never did find out the name of the opening band and I’m not going to go out of my way to do so; I’ll keep my review of them short and it will accordingly be lost in the annals of blogging history, unsearchable but for anyone trawling the pages of Google for ‘truly abysmal Californian three piece bands’. Lead singer: wannabe Cobain/Dylan/Jeff Buckley. Potential? Yes. Pretentious? Dear god yes. In fact I’ll invent a whole new word for him: ‘pretential’. To be fair to him he wasn’t a bad pianist. He wasn’t a terrible singer. And he had a look about him. But that was about it. The guitarist doesn’t warrant space on the page, nice a person as I’m sure he was. Pling pling, pling, plingy pling, Neil Young-style body bend for no apparent reason, period. The drummer was a girl. We’ll call her Lucy (that’s not her name). She would have been outshone by a click track with an auburn wig. I hate being mean. I’m going to stop.

Second up were The Generous Grants, who were really rather good actually. A impressive collision between Weezer and the Pixies, they had an immense amount of talent, heaps of likeability and a collection of great voices between them. The songmanship wasn’t outstanding but it was more than compensated for by their personality and their brilliant drummer. I would watch them again anytime.

With more talent than is necessary for three regular bands and creativity oozing from every orifice, The Reflectacles really have to be seen to be believed. After the first song they leave you with eyebrows raised. This band are GOOD. The lead singer has charisma in spades and a gravelly soul voice, backed up by a bevy of above average backing vocals and a sublime collection of musicians. You sit back in your chair, cautious. It could be fluke. Maybe they're a one hit wonder. Maybe you've just had a couple of beers too many.

Then they start the second song. And the OTHER lead singer starts up. And he has a voice fit for some truly heavenly blues stylings. That can’t be right, surely? TWO lead singers, BOTH exceptionally talented. Where’s the fairness in that? I’m sure they could carve their resources in two and make two perfectly acceptable bands from the remains. But they’ve chosen to pool their resources and as a result, the world is blessed with near enough a perfect example of what a great live band should be.

The Reflectacles: mmm, you can totally see what I mean by this picture, can't you. Once again I've proved I can take a mean gig photo. And that I need a new camera.

They are fiendishly difficult to pigeonhole. There are country, folk and blues elements within their music but none of those tags sit comfortably on their own. Just when you think you have them pegged they playfully subvert the genres and raise the bar even higher. You don’t know what to expect from them to start with: they are a collection a very different human beings, from the affable keyboard player who looked set to go on a 1940s boating holiday, to the lead guitarist who was pulling off a credible modern day Jesus look, complete with disaffected Jordan Catalano-style leaning (check your 90’s pop culture references, youngsters). One of the singers is a multi-instrumented genius, switching merrily from banjo to trumpet to harmonica throughout the set, clearly comfortable on all of them, exuding a laid back confidence that walks the line of cockiness without stepping over it – the perfect frontman.

But the music brings them together in absolute harmony, timeless and universally appealing but with enough kooky kitsch to give them the edge in an industry where it's becoming increasingly difficult to carve out any individuality. Their songs are nuggets of glorious feel-good-ery; I can easily imagine hearing them on Radio 1 or seeing them perform at Reading and Leeds, despite the fact they would spank the backsides of most of the other acts on either. What can I say other than LISTEN TO THIS BAND. They will be inside your head taking control of your brain completely against your will, and after two listens you'll be humming their glorious harmonies on autopilot. What can I say. The Reflectacles are an incurable aural infection. But quite a nice one, that sort of tickles. And you can only scratch the itch by going back to the beginning and listening all over again.

Wow. I really gushed there didn’t I. Oops. Ah well, I’m sure this band can live up to it. Now to bring them over to the UK. Although given my rather over-enthusiastic advances in San Francisco I might have scared them away forever. Er, sorry about that. Over to you, Britain!