The Orwells LIVE @ 100 Club, Oxford Street 24.2.14

The 100 Club is known for catering to an eclectic breed of the finest new acts to clamber their way onto the plinth of credible, new guitar music. So it seems only natural that the most sullenly appealing hallmark of all the new bad lad bands would take to its stage.

It’s hard to believe that The Orwells are fresh from high school and can’t even get served in their own hometown yet. Not because they’re fresh faced and infantile, because they’re definitely not. It’s not even the fact they make abrasive garage rock that sounds that natural that you imagine them snarling and smoking in their diapers. No, it’s because they’re so menacingly rakish that they don’t even seem human.

Frontman, Mario Cuomo, kind of scares me in the least deprecating way possible. His mane of dirty, blonde curls are steeped in sweat along with every other pore in his body but still part enough space to see his eyes. Seriously, fucking scary eyes at that. Manic if you will. His pupils dilate like a pill-popping schizoid as he leers unnervingly into the lens of every camera with a near enough radius. During the loud/quiet Ramones dynamic of ‘In My Bed’, Cuomo looks like he’s tautened between the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other as his vocals flit between tormented screech to doo-wop croon.

The rest of the band are merely just an extension of Mario’s antics even though he can’t seem to keep his hands off them. They’re genuinely crazier than any up and coming band you will see this year. The riffs are dirty, the songs are dirty and yes, they are dirty.

It seems like The Orwells are looking to pick up where every other exciting, visceral band left off and embody that all important punk spirit that aims to shock and energize rather than just make a lot of noise. It’s unruliness cranked up to 11 and they revel in every damn second. In one swift movement, Mario grabs a boisterous female from the front of the crowd, sits her on his waist and proceeds to “make-out”, as the Americans so eloquently put it, to a deliriously whooping crowd. One guy, in a maroon Harrington jacket, stage invades at least 10 times, but by the look on his face he could do it 50 times and the thrill would never wear off. Mario seems to take a liking to this guy because he grabs him into a bear hug and proceeds to howl down the microphone with said guy to the insanely good ‘Dirty Sheets’. I’d need photographic evidence to prove that Harrington guy has ever looked happier in his life. Ever.

Topping off the set with a grittier, jagged version of The Stooges ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ before shaking a bottle of beer into the crowd and tipping the remainder of the contents into Harrington guy’s mouth (the unexpected star of the night), The Orwells have cemented their status as more than just a band who refused to encore for David Letterman. Watch out, they’re coming for you.