EXPOSURE: All Too Animal

A week ago (almost to the minute) I was in The Queen of Hoxton begrudgingly listening to a God awful - pun intended - Christian band trying their little evangelical hearts out to win yet another battle of the bands evening. As I was about to repent and scream "I did it all right, I killed her!" in the hope of securing my cloud 9 ticket come Saturday's rapture, I suddenly realised that the band on stage had been upgraded to a brand spanking new act entitled All Too Animal. From then on, the evening was filled with promiscuous hip swinging and reckless abandon. Well, at least for the next immediate half hour. I should note that before the gig, All Too Animal asked me to write something about their début treading of the boards. At the risk of them incorrectly assuming I hated every minute of it, I thought I'd better write something - because I in fact loved all of it.

All Too Animal are a new band on the east London circuit. Employing the immaculately talented services of Luke Allwood, Alex Bruce, Will Clark, Louis D'Heudieres & Yuli Levtov, they make catchy indie tunes that had me humming for days after a single listen. They wear matching outfits and each have an allocated animal persona; how cute. When it comes to first gigs, most bands tend to either have a pathetically weak short set or rush song ideas at the composition stage and end up playing a bunch of sloppy numbers with an increasingly loud crowd chatter backing track. All Too Animal successfully avoided both of these pitfalls, performing a well rounded set of attractively worked songs. Clark's vocal melodies are genuinely beguiling and I left the venue with plenty of shower singing hours ahead of me.

Despite being a tricky musical genre to amuse a live audience, The Queen of Hoxton were certainly amused and the band won the evening's 'contest' in a landslide victory. They are part of the on-going Music League competition and their head-to-head happens on the 2nd June at The Hoxton Pony. The Facebook event can be found here. If you're unable to attend the event (and it's worth it to see them in shorts alone), you should still consider voting for them online here where you can also hear a demo track. I believe that the band are currently recording an EP so it won't be long until there are some better quality snippets for you to enjoy.

In the interest of transparency and journalistic integrity, I should add as a caveat that I have played on stage many times with the drummer of All Too Animal in another project and he is a dear friend. Although when you think about it, that would actually give me more reason not to support his other bands. Unless of course my opinions were sincere. Heaven forbid.