Although The Notwist have been around since the year dot (or the late eighties anyway), it’s only in the last few years that they’ve started to break through into the English-speaking ‘scene’.

Which of course has nothing to do with the quality of the electronica-slathered indie-rock that they’ve been peddling for at least the last ten years and everything to do with the ascendency of indie-rock as the predominant genre of ‘alternative’ music. Thus we have this evening’s spectacle of a group of lumpy Germans in their late-thirties playing for a semi-capacity crowd of Red Stripe guzzling twenty-somethings in the unfriendly interior of a student union building.

Ok, lumpy is unkind. Especially considering the quality of the performance tonight which is, unsurprisingly, top notch. There’s an oddly soothing dispassionate quality to Markus Acher’s voice (possibly just a side effect of the German accent) that gels perfectly with the slightly downbeat tunes that he sings. And which provides the perfect foil for the spastic bursts of electronic dyspepsia which tended to erupt three minutes or so in to each song, Acher’s comically exaggerated curls bobbing about like a bird’s nest in a typhoon.

Two encores later and said storm was perhaps beginning to wear out its welcome from this observer’s POV. Still, a solid showing from a consistently impressive group.
Oliver Downes