San Cisco – Belgrave Music Hall 14/10/13

San Cisco instantly send their small but fervent Belgrave Music Hall crowd into a summery furor with their turbocharged opener ‘Lyall’, which is rammed with playful melodic discourse, lively blasts of surf guitar and hook upon hook upon beautiful hook. This is infectious indie pop to the extreme. It’s punk with a smiley face. It’s, quite simply, fun.

And the catchiness keeps on coming. ‘Awkward’ injects you with a shot of pubescent danceability. ‘Nepal,’ a tune with romantic chord progressions and Koenig-esque allusions, uses a huge gang-vocal melody to take what you originally thought to be twee into grandeur. There are many different facets to these songs. On the one hand, they display a distinct desire to “freak out” as in ‘Stella,’ yet they also harbour a lyrical and musical sensibility that is exceptional for a band in relative juvenilia. Their work is comparable to that of The Beach Boys, fuelled by sunshine and melancholia in equal measure.

But tonight it is all about the former. Where the songs are somewhat distanced by heavy production on record, they impressively hit home in a live setting, making grizzly men at the rear of the room dance and sing like the gaggle of girls on the front row.

Each song from the Aussie four-piece’s self-titled debut album, released in the UK last week, sounds like a long-standing indie floorfiller. And although that proves this sort of sound has been made before, its ability to make you happy is hard to resist. You will be back for more.

Oliver Walkden

Photo: Musicfeed