Razorlight @ Manchester Roadhouse  - 14th January '04
		JUDGING by the buzz around them, Razorlight have already been earmarked as 2004’s rock-messiahs-in-waiting. Signed to a lucrative record deal last year after barely 12 months together, this young London-based guitar quartet certainly have swagger and crisp tunes in abundance. Like the Strokes, they write sleek, clipped, staccato songs steeped in the angular cool of vintage New York punk rock. And Razorlight’s livewire frontman, Johnny Borrell, emerged from the same circle of friends that produced the Libertines before forming his own breakaway band with two Swedish expats, the guitarist Björn Ålgren and bass player Carl Dalemo. But as they began their first substantial British headline tour at a sold-out Roadhouse on Wednesday, Razorlight defied fashionable genre labels. With their lean, percussive sound, they looked and sounded like a beat group in the classic sense, part of a continuum of passionate beanpole rockers from mods to punks to neogarage revivalists and beyond. They opened the show with the former single, Rip It Up, a vivid burst of primary colours and jagged power chords. Tunes like this could have been written 40 years ago or yesterday, their lyrics detailing the timeless cravings and compulsions of young urban males. Considering that Razorlight have only released three singles to date, they maintained an impressive level of excitement with a set that was largely unfamiliar to the Manchester crowd. Although some songs had an unpolished and ramshackle quality, none lacked spark, while a handful, notably the band’s bouncy new single Stumble and Fall, sounded instantly infectious. Borrell also proved to be a magnetic frontman, prowling the stage in a T-shirt modestly adorned with his own face, his manic energy never flagging. A star is born, or will be soon. Razorlight are not hugely original in sound or style. But crucially, one area in which they differ from the Strokes or the Libertines is in their willingness to step outside a narrowly defined New Wave aesthetic. Beneath the compact contours of their Manchester set, a more fertile profusion of influences began to bubble through, from spacey ripples of dub reggae to florid bursts of psychedelic guitar. Their thunderous closing number, In the City, certainly hinted at grander ambitions with its half-spoken beat poetry and fractured, shuddering melody. This ability to broaden and deepen a simple rock formula will serve them well when they are called upon to play these songs in larger venues, which will be sooner rather than later. Because even if they are not quite as messianic as their advance reputation suggests, these brash young contenders are clearly getting there fast. Stephen Dalton