Lovers In Monaco have been bubbling under the radar for three years now since their first performance at a sold out midwinter celebration at, of all places, Newtown Bowling Club, where they had people dancing on the tables and screaming for encores until the band had run out of songs. Almost exactly one year later the band announced their second gig, at Seatoun’s Sea Star Gallery, a performance that has swiftly entered local folklore via a literally eye-popping performance best read about via the post on Charles Mabbett’s blog.

They recently  featured at one of the Eyegum Music Collective free Wednesday night gigs at the San Francisco Bathhouse alongside new band Tidal Rave.

Tidal Rave include members of Kittentank and Echo Beach in a stellar lineup that features no less than three women playing loud guitars, driven by a tight rhythm section. The sound mix was good and they presented a selection of original material, sung by different band members, which had all the hallmark melody, chime and squall of excellent indie rock.

Lovers In Monaco were up next and are a great band for our schizoid post modern times, that seem to be quite serious about not being taken too seriously. I looked up their Under the Radar online profile and it says: “ Prog rap group that spends almost longer setting up than playing. Gear failure while playing live a strong likelihood”. On one hand they are a classic band, featuring the standard bass, drums, guitar and vocals lineup, but on the other they are a contemporary electronic combo with each musician also operating an equivalent digital apparatus amid a thicket of wires and leads, while the vocals are delivered through one of two microphones, one untreated and the other fed through a voice modulator.

Half of the songs seem to be about the songs or about the band performing the songs, not in a gangster rap ‘look at how cool I am up here on stage’ way, more in a hipster existentialist kind of ‘isn’t this odd that here we are on a stage making music’ kind of way, a sentiment that is well illustrated by the vocalist’s tendency to leap off stage at regular intervals in order to bash a tambourine or join the happy punters dancing to the trance inducing future disco rhythms.

Can you dance to them? Hell, yeah. Can you stand at the back, stroke your chin and trainspot influences? Yep, and that’s part of the fun.

Guitarist Nick Guy also operates the ambient electronic guitar project, ‘High Harbour’, with free downloads available here.