What would you do if you walked into a gig an hour late, asked he person nearest you who the warm-up act had been, and the reply came ‘Oh, you just missed Lesser Panda’. You’d be relieved right? WRRONNNG! For, despite a name that could surely only have been worse if they’d called themselves Fritzl, LP (we’re just going to call them LP from now on before Word spellcheck suggests we just piss off) have got a good thing going on here.

It starts off all Joy Division bassline, gets a bit Cure in the vocal, and the choruses have elements of the good bits of the Klaxons (there are some good bits of the Klaxons: you need to really try and stop scratching your eardrums with screwdrivers to make them out though). But best of all - once you get past the temptation to compare LP to other bands - you realise they have their own sound. The Lesser Panda sound. There’s not much chance of there being any other Lesser Panda sounds we suppose. Anyway, it’s a good sound, a sophisticated, muso-friendly, a-bit-goth-but-not-too-goth, moody sound. We like it. We really do. We’d just prefer it under another name. How about The Condiment Well? Lockerbie? Bukkake? Just think about it guys, you can have those ones for a nominal fee…

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