Joe's Big Toe

There are two Deport­ivos. The first, Déport­ivo, is an alt. rock band from Yve­lines, France. The other is an indie-pop five piece from West Lon­don, and this second group have attrac­ted a fair bit of industry atten­tion recently (they’ve been fea­tured on BBC Intro­du­cing; this single was mixed by Yoad Nevo, who’s worked with Sug­ababes, Girls Aloud, and Jem). The band’s EP, Girl Next Door, is made up of three tracks: Girl Next Door, a remix of Girl Next Door, and Cold in the Middle.

As the first track starts, there’s a min­im­al­ist feel to the song, clear vocals sound out over a simple synth bass­line. When the drums kick in, they’re sparse and uncom­plic­ated, keep­ing time, rather than play­ing a very act­ive part in driv­ing the song for­wards. Then the gui­tar kicks in for the chorus, and the song seems to fill out imme­di­ately. Almost like pulling the rip­cord on a life­jacket, the song goes from fly­weight to sumo in a heart­beat. After the chorus, the song goes back to its min­im­al­ist begin­nings, but some­how, the power and energy of the chorus still echoes. The track has a pretty broad appeal, span­ning the indie — pop gap very well indeed.

The Arclite remix is noth­ing like the ori­ginal track, and is more of a Dizzee Rascal-esque rap track which samples Girl Next Door, rather than a true remix. Where the ori­ginal was quite a romantic, harm­less song, this is a bit creepy, stalker­ish, even. Per­son­ally, I didn’t like it, and felt as though it detrac­ted from the ori­ginal rather than aug­men­ted it, but it’s always nice to see a young band exper­i­ment­ing. As a B-side, the band at least acknow­ledge that it might not be everybody’s cup of tea.

The third track on the single, Cold in the Middle, is, how­ever, some­thing a bit dif­fer­ent. It’s more tra­di­tion­ally indie than the first track, and com­par­is­ons with the Clash, cer­tainly in the chorus are more or less inev­it­able. I sus­pect that when the band get round to releas­ing an album, there will be more of this sort of thing on it than Girl Next Door.

It’s worth check­ing out their MySpace too, if only for the live acous­tic ver­sion of Girl Next Door, which shows off Justin Burnley’s voice beau­ti­fully. The link is http://www.myspace.com/deportivomusic