In December, when it was fucking freezing, the entirety of London Music Twitter went ruminating inside a rundown Community Arts Centre at the graveyard of the 242 bus line. They were there to watch BBC Sound of 2014 nominee Jungle, the nom de plume for a bunch of boys and girls who make the sort of culturally-expansive assonance that deservedly gives music fans a hard-on.The four tracks on Jungle’s Soundcloud – “Platoon”, “Drops”, “The Heat”, and “Lucky I Got What I Want” - are brilliantly unadulterated slices of creative pop that demand instant rotation. They breathe life.So the prospect of them airing a bunch of new tracks at their first London show meant the room was awash with anticipation. It’s not uncommon for an artist’s debut show in the capital to feel like that. Hype is like heroin here, and everyone is smoozing for a hit. But Jungle play guitars, and if reports are to be believed, then guitar music has been the grubby concern of girls in polka dot dresses and uni lads who wear v-cut vests with Catcher In The Rye quotes on them. Yet, at Chats Palace, it was reincarnated, taking on a new lease of life far away from the desolate tropes of landfill indie and into a vivid new world where soundscapes rule.Guitar music isn’t dead, it never was, it never has been, and talking about it makes me want to reach inside someone’s mouth and poke their tonsils with a pencil just so they never open it again. Sure, lots of shitty, clichéd, boring guitar bands exist. But so do lots of shitty, clichéd, and boring hip-hop artists, EDM producers, and pop princesses. Lots of other artists are using the guitar in much more interesting ways, delving into R’n’B and soul influenced caverns of opportunity.Take, for example, a band like The XX. On their debut record the band stitched together minimalistic riffs resulting in a record that, five years later, people are still meaningfully fucking to. Or someone like Frank Ocean, who, on Channel Orange, employed the use of John Mayer’s plectrum skills to help bring more rhythm and blues to his rhythm and blues. Both records are unforgettable, the innovative use of instrumentation providing each with a never-ending life support.
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