The Bodega Brothers: Afternoon Delight

One of the Bodega Brothers' songs, 'I Don't Want No Cubs', is about how they've got no time for guys who wear badges on their shirt and neckerchiefs fastened with woggles. Like most of this musical duo's offerings, it's gently amusing without eliciting much more than titters from the audience. But after they bring up the boy scouts, it occurs to me that there's something more than a little earnest and Akela-ish about the boys themselves.

They are winningly disguised as cheerful victims of the credit crunch, two twenty-something idlers who wear pyjamas in the afternoon. They sit around drinking tea in their living room of a set and occasionally pick up their acoustic guitars. But they're a bit too clean, a bit too nice and posh to pull off the slacker thing. Their jaunty numbers have the jollity of campfire songs.

The lyrics are witty, with a few exceptions ('The Dinosaurs Were Gay' in particular is a tedious knees-up at gunpoint), and there's no doubting the enthusiasm or the musical chops of the Brothers, who are also starring in the award-winning musical Barbershopera. The musical touchstones are all 90s and groanworthy, with nods to Shaggy and (shudder) 'The Thong Song' as well as TLC; but other offerings are more original, such as a weird number about nature documentaries, which concludes with a pod of supercilious dolphins taunting a lonely great white shark. Occasionally an inspired rhyme elicits a real guffaw. It's all nice enough, just don't go in expecting to discover the new Flight of the Conchords.