Time Out 'On The Up' presents The Mules + The Victorian English Gentlemen's Club + Pop Levi September 6, 2006

Time Out say:

In a topsy-turvy world where even that fat-faced manchild from Keane turns out to be some sort of opium-eater, it’s getting harder and harder to find safe, decent, upstanding, clean-living music you can take home to mother. Good. That’s what the Mel Tormé section’s for in HMV (if there is one – we wouldn’t know). As tonight’s gig shows, the rebel has all the best tunes, so why not throw off your mental chains and treat yourself to a night of aural off-roading?

Headlining are wonderful cabaret polka-punks The Mules, whom we’ve previously described as sounding like ‘a very boozy Balkan wedding’, a comment that only makes more sense the more we see of them. Their sound-library skiffle-rock references rockabilly, blues, country and the theme tune to ‘Camberwick Green’. It’s almost certainly not like anything you’ve heard before, unless you’re an alcoholic Macedonian polygamist.

Support comes from the spicily punkoid yet equally inventive Victorian English Gentlemens Club, whose ‘Pixies as a B-52’s tribute band’ schtick is one of the most refreshingly boisterous things you’ll hear this year. And that doesn’t mean boisterous in an Ordinary Boys way – VIX (as they’re officially abbreviated) have also chosen the path less trodden, injecting their choppy new wave with alt-pop and garage stylings.

And make sure you get down there early. Kicking off the evening in majestic fashion is new psychlord on the block Pop Levi, whose densely layered acid-glam anthems are what Aphex Twin would sound like if he played astral rock ’n’ roll instead of techno.

If there’s one show you should not miss this week, it’s this one. And we’re not even just saying that because we’re putting it on.

Tickets £6 advance from TicketWeb

Official Website: http://www.timeout.com/london/music/events/245822/on_the_up-the_mules_victorian_english_gentlemens_club_pop_levi.html