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Rating: Two months after missing the Independent Days Festival in Bologna, I cannot pass up the opportunity to test what these youngsters, who have just appeared on the European music scene, are made of.
I am probably a snob, but I would definitely avoid any comments on the opening band, which, if I didn't misunderstand the singer's greeting, should be called Aulin Box. At most, I could make comments about the singer, with a rather mischievous smirk. ... Better move on.
Very few stage effects, but some well-managed smoke jets and intimate plays of light and shadow create the necessary atmosphere to welcome the quartet of musicians from Birmingham. The live show starts the same as the album: "Lights" ignites the audience, highly engaged by the pounding rhythm of the first of the three gems from The Back Room. Mr. Tom Smith (vocals) brings a stage presence of excellent level, which one would expect from artists long at the height of their career and not from young men like these, who should understandably feel the tension of promoting a debut album. Even more so, if overloaded with responsibility after the 'slendide splendenti' reviews appearing in the most acclaimed European fanzines. Ed Lay's drumming pounds away and the hype meter rises as the singer's performance continues, with wild movements akin to our own Iggy Pop, alternating with rigidity reminiscent of the robotic protagonists in Michel Gondry's video, and offering the guitar to the audience like a sacrificial lamb in pagan rituals.
The band increasingly commands the stage, delivering a truly convincing live set. The novelty compared to the album lies in the way the songs are presented, with a much more rock and much less dark cut, the voice is less deep and more intoxicating. This appeared to be a choice rather than a deficiency: in some cases, the baritonal quality comes back to dominate, but Tom Smith's approach was to use the "Ian_Curtis-like" style only briefly. There were multiple new sound solutions, the most interesting of which gave a prominent role to the guitar instead of leaving it in the background during the performance of "Camera," legitimizing it as a little sibling, for its numerous references, of U2's "Where The Streets Have No Name."
Impeccable, virtuosic, and with a polychromatic pace. Of course, being a debuting band, the whole set lasted about an hour, during which all the tracks from "The Back Room" were played along with a couple of previously unreleased tracks, which if I understood correctly, had appeared as bonuses in the Japanese limited edition.
Rating 3/5: is it a bit stingy as a rating? Probably because in the universe of DeBaser, we have gotten too used to giving 4s or 5s like it's nothing. 3 is not a bad rating; it doesn't mean that what is being reviewed didn't leave a positive impression; obviously, 7 or 7.5 would be more appropriate, but there's always the usual age-old problem of the fifth-scale, and 4/5 would objectively be too high. There should be at most ten 5s a year, not 10 a day!
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