No Ceremony ///

No Ceremony/// gave up anonymity last year in favour of playing shows and having their own band identity that wasn’t shrouded in mystery. The buzz that had surrounded their faceless sound continued in a way that must have relieved them, especially considering their secrecy was only a way of making sure people listened before they looked.
So when Kelly, Victoria and James performed live, in many ways, nothing changed. Which leads us up to this point.
The point in which their debut album has been out for a fortnight and in many ways appeared to fail to convert the hype, radio play and admirable touring into chartable sales.

Of course, as I’ve stated before, there’s no magic formula for charting, but the hope that you can turn a solid touring schedule and amount of popularity into a top40 chart position is a fair one. That’s not even to say their debut and self titled album isn’t any good, but the theory that good music doth a chart position create was lost some time ago. No, No Ceremony’s record is a powerful, pulsating 35minutes in which its singles are hardly distinguishable (in terms of quality and structure) from the remainder of the 9 tracks that feature.

It was last year that my mate John first yelled the words No Ceremony at me. He’d read an article by the Guardian’s Paul Lester and was really very excited. He demanded we go see them at the next possible opportunity, which for me was Brighton’s Great Escape. Hundreds of bands on the coast, including No Ceremony who were on at past midnight. A Red Stripe or three for breakfast accompanied by some fish and chips and we were on the way to midnight via lots of exciting music. Night approached and we made our inebriated ways to No Ceremony. The venue’s rammed, many of the viewers blogger-types and the similarly informed to John and myself.

When you hear something as powerful as PARTOFME and HURTLOVE on record, you expect your organs to tremor in a live scenario. To be disappointed by something sounding no better than record isn’t usually an issue, but for some reason with No Ceremony it just is and that’s where their problem lies. FEELSOLOW, the band’s newest single was another track that filled you up with nocturnal energy and possibly the strongest track on the record, AWAYFROMHERE which features the vocal stylings of James Vincent McMorrow takes that energy and compresses it into how you feel at 4am on a Saturday morning. That feeling of having a great time but having little left with which to enjoy said time with. AWAYFROMHERE is enchanting and it gets better the more exhausted you are, which, by the end of a night listening to No Ceremony, John and I were.

You can’t write the formula for success, not even when you’ve laid the foundations so well and created a solid record. You can however, enjoy the creation regardless of its failings, and that’s the point we are at.

8

Braden Fletcher