A few days before Peace arrive in Brighton they tweet “How has this tour been SO good? Mood: Love”. They’ve certainly been getting around – all those BBC radio plays of ‘Bloodshake’ not to mention all the glossy stills of the band, wearing all of the right clothes, in all of the right mags. We were expecting a lot.

The guys remain cool under the weight of expectation at Concorde2 tonight. “Follow Baby” is performed with a stoned lethargy. Singer Harrison Koisser wears a tie-dyed cardigan, hair obscuring his face, and sexily slurs god-knows-what over grungy guitars. Is he singing “deep” or “deal” or “feel”? It becomes a game.

The syrup-sweet lyrics of ‘Lovesick’ are easier to pick out. The reckless abandon of the song and the messy drums gets the young crowd jumping around, less self-consciously than before.

The buzz of the crowd dies down during the next song ‘Waste Of Paint’, and a bored audience member admits to his friend, “I only came for Lovesick”. This might be so, but he still patiently listens through the rest of the show waiting for another chorus worth jumping around to. That’s the thing with Peace, you have to sift through a lot of mediocre noise for an exciting 10 seconds.

There are a few exceptions. ‘1998’, a song taken from Peace’s EP ‘Delicious’, is worth staying out for. Harrison’s repeatedly coos “wash away” over waves of dreamy instrumentation. It sounds good and we can see it working beautifully under a setting sun for a cider-happy, festival crowd.

The encore of ‘Bloodshake’ is of course another exception. The stage lights turn a bloody red, and the bouncy riff gets the crowd a-squealing and jumping again. Mood: Love. And the band parts on that note with a few blown kisses.

Concorde2, Wednesday 24th April 2013
Words by Nisha Bhakoo
Photos by Jack Beard