White Rabbits @ Lexington, London

Time is a funny thing. A liquid, amorphous, constantly shifting thing, impossible to tie down, impossible to explain via the rules that we mortal men rely on to make sense of this crazy mixed up world we call home.

It flows, unstoppable. Shifting, changing. And yet it is also a human construct. The measurement of time is something that we have created. A scale to measure the unmeasurable.
But what does it mean? The fact that it’s always 8pm somewhere on this planet? What does that tell you about time? What does that tell you about humans? What does that tell you about clocks? Where’s Stephen Hawking when you need him. Surely he can’t have got far.

To think, if we’d been in Montevideo, this would be a somewhat contrasting review. If we’d trudged in off the Copacabana, fresh from storming to victory in a beach volleyball contest, stopping only to empty the sand from our thongs and collect the requisite umbrella topped cocktail from a glistening buxom bikini-clad babe basking in Brazilian sunshine, everything would have been very different.

Different in two, key, ways. One, thongs would have definitely been out. Two, Blood Red Shoes would not have been simultaneously very good and very bad. Which they were, because we can’t know definitively. Without looking, we can’t know how they fared. It’s all about quantum states: dead and alive. Wave and particle. Very good and very bad.

Hey, at least Schrdinger had a cat to help him. We had one and a half songs. Give that to any Austrian physicist and see how they get on.

However, it did tell us something. White Rabbits should in no way be headlining a gig ahead of a band that we actually quite wanted to see, and that should by all laws of theoretical physics be on at a time such that the frames-of-reference of this experiment would have finished their drinks, and been in the correct state to begin.

Unlike Blood Red Shoes, White Rabbits were not entangled. They were not indeterminate. They were just quite bad. Although, on the plus side, at least their preppy Vampire Weekend leanings are tempered with the good sense to stay well away from that annoying Afrobeat fixation that makes you want to cut your own ears off with a copy of Paul Simon‘s Graceland.

And on the double plus side, they’ve got one song (Percussion Gun) which is great. But like a man with a girlfriend substantially more attractive than themselves, there’s something a bit disconcerting about an average band with a spectacular song. What is she doing with him? Is she a hooker? Is he loaded? Does have a snake in the trouser department? Does she have a snake in the trouser department?

None of which have obvious equivalents when dealing with the nearside of that metaphor. But regardless of the positives, the negatives abound. They’re boring, lacking in presence and lacking in anything close to the speck of originality needed to keep you vaguely interested. Appropriately enough, White Rabbits were a waste of time.