Slam Cartel Live at Sonisphere !011

As often as seeing the familiar big names, Music festivals are all about discovering your next favourite band. Now here at CB we get sent a shipment of music, almost too often to hold up with, but only occasionally something drops through the letterbox that really catches the attention.

One such recent arrival was Handful Of Dreams, the debut release from London rockers Slam Cartel.

We have been listening to this one quite a lot since it dropped on the mat and when we noticed that the set were passing to be performing the Jager stage at Sonisphere we marked them down as one to break out. They throw a distinctive sound. It`s Rock`n'Roll certainly but with a touch of grunge and a big, commercial (in a right way) sound.

The band kicked off their short set with their cover version of Talking Head`s Once In A Lifetime. It`s invariably a courageous move taking a new angle on a classic track but this rocked-up version works intimately on CD and is still better live. It`s a blanket that draws people in to determine the set, everyone knows the row and frontman Giles Van Lane even manages to fire a sing along from the decent sized crowd.

The band keep the crowd`s interest going with Handful Of Dreams, an infectious slice of guitar driven Rock`N'Roll, just perfect for the other evening sunshine. It`s always risky advocating bands to see at festivals but the several members of team CB that I`d dragged along to see this were clearly having a big time.

My favorite track from their forthcoming album was up next, It`s hard to describe Wishing Eye. It kicks off with a neat grungey riff before a real anthemic stadium-huge vibe kicks in.

The dim burning Hold Me was a brave choice given the dead set sentence the set had but the way it builds up from a slow, emotional start carried the bunch along, holding our interest until the big riffs and bigger vocals come out to play.

The stadium rocker feel is support for Powerstorm, Giles Van Lane has a damn good sound and a stage presence that belies the band`s relatively low status. In fact that`s probably true of the whole band. Terence Warville and Tom Hendriksen on guitar don`t do the rockstar shape throwing thing, they very often let their playing speak for itself and leave center stage to their frontman.

The set closes with, appropriately, Sundown which captures all of the several elements that go to realize this band so well in one track, kicking off with Steve Campkin`s drums before Adam Lee`s Keyboards and Marc Neudeck`s Bass enter the disturbance one by one.

Slam Cartel were a lot I had pretty high expectations of before I saw them at Soni, and those expectations were more than met by their last performance. It`s invariably a right thing if the worst a reviewer can say is "the set wasn`t long enough", and that`s how this performance left me feeling.