Who hasn’t got enough MySpace friends to fill The Roundhouse?

This year’s Camden Crawl, now brought to you by Gaymers, sees the welcome addition of The Roundhouse to the roster of venues. Doubly good because firstly the size of the acts that it has attracted as a result – Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Enemy play it on Friday, Little Boots, The View, The Maccabees and Kasabian on Saturday, The Fall, Madness, Echo & The Bunnymen, 808 State and Billy Bragg elsewhere.  Secondly because come the last slots of the night, there’ll either be plenty of room to see the headliners under the domed roof or there will be about 4,000 people less on Camden High Street trying to get in something/anything.

With this in mind we here have decided to hopefully give you a nod in the direction of a few newer acts that we feel might be worth seeking out. With the self-imposed criteria that their official MySpace page doesn’t have enough friends to fill the Roundhouse (3000 standing and 1800 seated). Hopefully, with the mini-festival featuring the likes of Adele, The Automatic, Foals, Guillemots, Kate Nash, Ida Maria, Ladyhawke, Late of The Pier, Laura Marling, Noah and The Whale and White Lies in embryonic stage amongst it’s small venues in the past couple of years, you’ll be thanking us for giving you an excuse to play the “I was there” card within a year.

BLK JKS: MySpace friends: (As of 18/4/09) 2510. (Johannesburg, South Africa)

With the deluge of New York bands that sound like they are from Africa it’s only fair that we give the spotlight to a South African band that sound like they are from Brooklyn. The most thrilling thing about BLK JKS is that they don’t sound like the earnest elements of TV on the Radio’s output where they are striving to be considered as successors to Radiohead but more akin to the one those found on ‘Wolf Like Me’ The drums, the yelping multi-tracked vocals are only going to make you think of David Sitek and Tunde Adebimpe, but you can dance your arse as much as you can stroke your chin to it. They have just started their first UK tour but the loose tightness of the band on the Mystery EP from earlier this year can be put down to a decade of playing together. I realise that loose tightness is an oxymoron but the songs vary between arty sound colleges and close knit, rumbling, riff roller-coasters.) . On ‘Mystery’ they crash out like Purple Rain era Prince being backed by The Stone Roses’ Reni. The rhythm section is just as tight on their other songs fellow Manchester band The Smiths and on ‘It’s In Every Thing You See’ they bring to mind the gloomy hiss of Joy Division’s ‘The Eternal’ and the guitar guest work of Robert Fripp. Expect them to showcase material from their being worked on debut, After Robots which might sound more world music than Roxy Music in a live setting.

Everything Everything: MySpace friends: 2547 (Manchester)

Named after the Underworld lyric from ‘Cowgirl’, Everything Everything dip their toes into so many genre rivers that twiddly art-rock disco doesn’t begin to do them justice. On demo ‘Weights’ they alternately sound like The Beach Boys hanging out at Studio 54 then The Futureheads via the more childlike rhymes of the Aphex Twin then The Beach Boys again via Daft Punk. On ‘Photoshop Handsome’ they mix a glorious new wave hooks full of video game references with post DFA guitar sunbursts. For anyone looking for a math-rock band who have heard some records this decade, sing like they mean it and allow you to move your feet (if you can lift them off the floor, it is Camden) this is the band for you.

Goldheart Assembly MySpace friends: 714 (London)

Like when The Strokes shook up the British music scene to an extent even five years later their influence, via The Libertines, was the primary one seen in not just new bands’ music but they way they looked. With the canning of Joe Lean and The Jing Jang Jong’s album last year we may have seen that trend reach an end. I’d happily wager the band that is heavily influencing the up-and-coming kids in a similar manner over here now is The Fleet Foxes. In under a year they have gone from being a minor buzz on the back of an EP to a big selling, critically acclaimed band that could choose a couple of bands they’ve influenced in every major British city to support them.  Goldheart Assembly are one such band and thankfully the similarities go beyond beards and checked shirts. One key difference that Fleet Foxes copyists across the land seem to have missed is that you can fill the songs with a sense of joy and euphoria as well as melancholy, listen to the acidic guitar line interrupting the verses on ‘Going Down Well’ which features the neat trick of not becoming simply a capella when the drums cool down, it’s met by scuzzy, dirty lick.

The Shitty Limits MySpace friends: 2011 (Reading)

The Shitty Limits manage to pull off sounding like they should be on the Nuggets compilation, No Thanks!: The 70’s Punk Rebellion box-set and warranting a mention in the book ‘Our Band Could Be Your Life’.  The band has already come to the attention of Rough Trade, featuring on the prestigious Counter Culture 08 compilation, as well as selling out 5 sets of DIY 7″s in the past year. (However they are available for free on their MySpace page for those that missed out). For all the screaming and ferocious drumming linked with American hardcore punk and dirty late sixties garage there’s a still a peculiar sense of Englishness to the way that one of the best live bands we’ve seen recently infuse the racket with hooks.

The Invisible MySpace friends: 2521 (London)

The Invisible are another band receiving a multitude of TV on the Radio references in their press, wholly justified but like BLK JKS it’s only telling part of the story. For all the moments they sound like a more restrained and laid-back version of the New Yorkers there are other moments that bring to mind Krautrock, Bloc Party, Prince or Radiohead. You can tell from the way they play each other that all three of them have been around for a while, playing for Roisin Murphy, Amy Winehouse and Polar Bear at different times. Skilfully matching their pop sensibilities with their more out-there tendencies, Matthew Herbert has done much the same with their record as he did with Micachu and the Shapes. You can expect them to be more energetic in their flesh than they sound on record.