Review: CHINAH, The Lexington.

“The winter has made me want it more” sings Fine Glindvad, as Away from Me – the suitably brumal début single by nascent Danish three-piece, CHINAH – begins; but astonishingly, with no more than a mere two tracks for fans and budding aficionados of the band to mull thereover for the time being, things are really beginning to hot up – and palpably so – about she and Simons Andersson and Kjær.

Accommodating the Danes, if well and truly unwelcome here in N1, is a completely uncompromising wind redolent of those to whistle through the autumnal nooks and crannies of their native Copenhagen which gusts back and forth, up and down Pentonville Road with grim, unrelenting vim. However, the Norsemen (and woman) onstage upstairs at numbers 96-98 conversely provide a positively alluring, and intermittently heartwarming set, to ensure we’re left craving further material all the more desperately than ever previously…

Musically, the scintillating creations of CHINAH perhaps have most in common, contemporarily talking, with one Tahliah Debrett Barnett, with both Away from Me and the similarly impressive We Go Back – both lifted from a forthcoming, and as-yet untitled début EP – recalling glimpses of LP1, the latter track benefitting from those same dense, nebulous bass lines and scampering, palm-muted guitars to have propelled Pendulum toward the comparative apices of FKA twigs’ otherwise unremarkable record of yesteryear. Yet whereas LP1 often plateaued at tedium, and plausibly did so ad tedium also, CHINAH’s incomparably more appealing reappropriating many a common trope of ’90s R&B is what really swings this one in their favour.

For a) on the basis of the remaining five or six songs aired this evening, there’s plenty yet to come from this discernibly ascendant trio, but more importantly, b) their manipulation of musical preachings from their formative years has already been irrefutably finely refined. As such, the likes of Aaliyah, TLC, Toni Braxton, Brandy, and Monica (and indeed, Brandy & Monica, as well as fellow electro-pop eccentrics Sylvan Esso) spring to mind, thus formalising more of an unlikely allegiance with the United States than (an admittedly, inordinately more unlikely one) with the People’s Republic whence their moniker comes. Nonetheless, the spin put on things proves incontrovertibly contemporary throughout, with this thus lucidly elucidating both the ascendancy aforesaid, on top of a ready superiority over many of their already well-established contemporaries. And so, as shrivelled leaves fall from withering trees, by the time that aforementioned EP at last drops, there’s every reason to believe the autumn months will subsequently belong to this particular, and apparently, particularly spectacular three-piece…