Reviewed on Saturday October 1.

The concept of musical ‘coolness’ is a tricky one. Tunes that routinely get characterised as stylish by the media are exactly the same kind of songs destined to inspire great bouts of cringe only years later, as even the most cursory of glances at the hits of the early ’00s proves. Music has a shelf-life, and more often than not, it’s a short one.

For that reason, Chastity Belt’s showing at the Oxford Art Factory was a rare treat: a chance to see four singularly skilled musicians showing off the kind of ineffable cool that seems impervious to the great, encroaching weight of the daggy.

Tunes shimmered and held in the air, full of the kind of pleasures that more often than not revealed themselves in the short moments of silence after they had actually concluded. The band’s music comes with its own artful, inbuilt delay: it would be patronising to describe a tune like ‘Drone’ as a grower, but performed live, the song had the audience making those short, breathy noises people make when something very beautiful reveals itself almost as if by accident, and the gig’s quieter moments proved as powerful as the instrumental jam sessions that closed out the set proper.

Indeed, a tune like ‘Time To Go Home’ doesn’t rely on great, clanging choruses; nor does it pummel its listener into submission. Rather, it rests on insinuation, the knockout punch camouflaged as an afterthought.

Songs flowed perfectly from one to the next, and though the band’s most recent album, Time To Go Home, was paid the most attention, cuts were slipped in from No Regerts and the group’s incoming third record, currently unnamed. In that way it proved to be a gig both perfectly tailored for the fans – one of those shows that die-hards could not have walked away wanting more from – and also a brilliant way to introduce the group to the uninitiated.

But more than that, the gig delighted on that oh-so-mysterious, nebulous level: it was fucking cool. Cool in a way that relies not on the things we’ll look back and cringe at – not on clothes, or slang, or such surface level concerns – but cool in a way that defies time, and the shitty things it does to us. Cool the way rock’n’roll should be; music that obviously requires a great deal of effort, delivered with seemingly no effort at all.

Header photo by Brianna Elton.

Get unlimited access to the coverage that shapes our culture.
to Rolling Stone magazine
to Rolling Stone magazine