Delphic

Stood up by Debs I have to resort to Pete (nothing personal mate!) who gets my text on a mountain chair lift high in the Alps. Meet on a wet windy night at Old Street and after a quick pint watching England under 21s beating Sweden on a muddy 70s style pitch we stride off to find the entrance to Xoyo. In and through the upstairs bar we walk down the stairs through billowing dry ice and then back up for a pint where we can see each other. After chatting in the trendy corrugated iron ceilinged bar we venture back down into Hades' ethereal atmosphere. Mainly young uns down here shuffling about to the aceed house influenced DJ probably too young to remember from the 1st time around. After a good warming up Delphic take the stage - three dark suited bearded trendies. With white shirted drum and bass session musicians - what I mean is a drummer and bassist, not a couple of drum and bass samplers on Macs. Very Sly and Robbie but instead of reggae they start off with a pretty funky beat underpinning the keyboards and guitars of the main Delphic guys. Great venue as wide around the stage so everyone can get a good view; and Pete and I find a platform to stand on until we're fed up with the necking couple in front of us. From modern indie funk Delphic treat us to a journey with smatterings of Chemical Brothers to Hard Fi morphing into Fleetwood Mac soaring music and high vocals and then settling back into a funky groove reminiscent of the folded LCD Soundsystem. A little ironic as Delphic always sounded a little restrained when maybe a bit of old fashioned rocking out to get our heads banging or more modern big club anthemic highs to get our hands clapping would have gone down well. Well, with me and Pete anyway. So just as they go all LCD they sound like they are finding their edge for a couple of songs but then they finish and no encore. Overall very enjoyable but leave feeling a little of what might have been if their bottled water had been reinforced with vodka.