Tribes
“I realised that there’s no point being in a band if you’re not gonna be one of those life-changing bands,” Tribes singer Johnny Lloyd has proclaimed. “Not the ones you stroke your chin to, the ones you beat your heart plate to.”
Just how life-changing this Camden four-piece depends on who you talk to. Half of their homeland seems to hail them as the saviours of a rock scene saturated with guitar-toting hipster tossers. The other half think Tribes are guitar-toting hipster tossers and just the next in the queue of overblown buzz bands hailed as the saviours of something or rather.
Still, ignoring the war of words they’ve incited, it’s hard not to be drawn to their rogue-ish, sweetly-distorted alt-rock that sounds like the offspring of US grunge lords The Pixies and English lightning rods The Libertines. No matter how much the band say so, top tunes like ‘Corner of an English Field’ and ‘Sappho’ aren’t exactly life-changing, but they do make it a little sweeter.