The Soft Pack did play a very tight set at the Ukrainian cultural center on Sunday night, they were not very chatty, but with their clean-college-anti-hipster look and frontman Matt Lamkin‘s morose and more-than confident vocals, they launched eight of their little missile-like songs without even taking a breath between them.
Songs like ‘Pull out’ and ‘Answer to yourself’ have actually grown on me since the last time I have heard them, and I was totally into the laid-back swagger of the delivery, it’s infectious music which push you to get there physically and mentally with lyrics like ‘You gotta answer to yourself/You can't depend on anyone else/You gotta know where you stand’, a sort of gentle badass attitude and an organized chaos of guitars, drums synth and even sax this time.
The songs were straightforwardly rocking, but at the same time quite sophisticated, capturing influences from all over the rock-punk spectrum, The Strokes may be on ‘Parasites’, or the Doors on the throbbing ‘Pull Out’, The Cure on ‘Answer to yourself’, R.E.M. on ‘More or Less’, a sort of amalgam of their record collection? But a retro sound? Not so much, their catchy sound was as efficient as fresh, never close to a cliché or a pastiche, the five pack playing detached but expeditious, with a raw energy produced by an explosion of guitar riffs (Matty McLoughlin), loud drums (Brian Hill) and Matt Lamkin‘s nonchalant croon.
They played songs from their last album and from the previous one (‘Bright side’, ‘Extinction’), when they were still called the Muslims, and some that may be new songs (‘Captain Ace’, ‘Ray’s mistakes’?) with the same combination of awesome hooks, careless attitude and high energy, moving softly on stage but triggering some real action in the crowd, which started the usual surfing-jumping-stage-diving that seems to be the every-day game at a FYF fest these days.