Melody Maker apr19-apr25 2000
SIX BY SEVEN
THE CHARLOTTE
LEICESTER
4 1/2 stars
THE kids are frowning. There's a joylessness to the atmosphere. They perceive in Six By Seven an inarticulate melancholy trying to be literate, and yet, there's such a huge rumble, a blaze of sound, exploding from the stage, a flash forward to a beautiful future misery.
Tonight Six By Seven are f***ed-off and f***ed-up, and I've never heard them sound any better - with something to play against, a crowd with a lagered up hostile faction, a soundmix careening into blather and feedback at each turn.
It's Six By Seven's perfectionism and seriousness that's rubbing some here up the wrong way. To their credit they don't let it slip for a moment, cut cheerlessly lairy figures onstage, spit banter like a kid who's gonna bring bombs to school. You wouldn't give them a second glance until they play, and then you don't know where to look, how to get your head round the boom and hiss.
On "Brilliantly Cute", the sound is arranged like it should be blasting from the boot of a blacked-out BMW, while even "Oh Dear" piles into astonishing, seismic funk bits, layers of bass peeling away to a livid stripped coil of riffola and Chris's perfectly broken vocals. "Another Love Song" is inarguable: it's here where Six By Seven eclipse middle-class pretty alterno-rock (Radiohead, Muse) to make noise with a point, an effect, beyond arrangement, artistry and intelligence, drunk on its own instinctive morbidity and sumptuous decay.
A vexing few minutes of sound f***-ups and then "My Life Is An Accident" comes on like Girls Against Boys' uglier fatter friend. The least expansive, most exquisitely insular music you've heard in too long, the sound looping out in beams and bending back to the stage, penetrating the players. When "Overnight Success" and "Don't Wanna Stop" crash and burn the pit like hot tar off the cathedral roof, you've realised just how pissed Chris is and how triumphant tonight is. Spiritual as only the pure, convinced and hellbound can be. Get in their way.
NEIL KULKARNI
Chris Olley's verdict: VOCALS/GUITAR "It was the first night of the tour and we're working with a new soundman at the moment - we'll be better in about two or three gigs, but despite all the sound problems and the odd twat in the audience, I thought it went well. When I said 'It's nice to play the Charlotte, but it'd be nicer to play somewhere else', did I mean it? Yeah."