Peace, Heaven - music review

Peace arrived in 2013 accompanied by more buzz than a beehive. The poster boys of Birmingham’s emerging B-Town scene, they were touted as the next great guitar band.

Then everyone heard their debut, In Love, concluded the future of music sounded a lot like early-Nineties Manchester and decided perhaps it wasn’t worth giving Peace a chance after all.

It seemed to condemn the four-piece to the fate of the “firework band”: a brief explosion of colour followed by a quick plummeting to earth.

Not quite. Their second album, Happy People, packs in more hits and hooks than a boxing match and last night’s gig was a reminder of their status as an exhilarating live act.

The subterranean sweat pit of Heaven provided the perfect environment in which to experience their hedonistic indie rock — even if the crowd was so young the bar remained largely empty.

Set opener Higher than the Sun had all the classic Peace ingredients: echo-drenched guitars courtesy of Douglas Castle and a keening, optimistic chorus courtesy of frontman Harry “Harrison” Koisser.

Next up, Follow Baby’s big beats cued pogo-ing all the way to the back while new number Gen Strange sounded like a hit-in-waiting. Even Perfect Skin — so toe-curlingly wimpy on record — was transformed into a tub-thumping sing-along.

If Money veered dangerously close to the lad-rock of Hard-Fi, the euphoric California Daze made a Monday night in the capital feel like Sunday night at Glastonbury: girlfriends were put on shoulders, lighters were lit and a mass sing-along commenced.

Elsewhere, cover versions of Led Zeppelin’s Since I’ve Been Loving and trance duo Binary Finary’s 1998 (Delicious) suggested that if Peace are musical revisionists, they are at least reading from a wide range of material. The buzz may have subsided but the best, you sense, is yet to come.