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Rating: After a journey of about an hour, I arrive at Brussels Central Station. That's where I was supposed to meet Anita, a friend coming from Italy specifically for this concert.
As usual, we are late: we enter the Cirque Royal at 8:15, while the concert had already started (unexpectedly, for us Italians...) at 8 sharp. Fortunately, their opening act wasn't great: the singer was terrible, and the keyboardist was offbeat. Plus, they used too many pre-recorded tracks.
At 9:10, the concert began. "Playground Hustle", the first track of the album, sounded slightly different to me. The arrangements had been changed a bit, and the result was better. Now, I won't go through the tracklist and judge each one, because it seems quite silly, but I'll just comment in general.
Many of the songs on their album had folk vibes, like a-guitar-on-the-shoulder-and-go style. Besides the guitars, there was a childlike voice, both the strength and limitation of the album, adding an extra touch of countryside. At the concert, everything simply changes. The singer's voice, Olivia, was absolutely resolute. In "Stay (Just a little more)", she gives a clear example of the power a female voice can have.
The folk sounds are now in the background, giving way to more intense electric guitars, a bit more "grunge" (the idea, admittedly not entirely accurate, came to me when Dan, the pianist, shouted Kurt Cobain-style in Aha, the best song of the evening, which I completely reassessed), more homogeneous. The solitary trio of acoustic guitar-uncertain voice-sweet percussion was swapped for a trio of electric guitar (and bass)-noteworthy voice-powerful percussion. The new drummer who joined the duo, a self-proclaimed Jonny Giant (!), plays the drums very loudly, and the other two have to keep up with him. A great addition.
The Do also presented two new songs, one very electronic, following the more "strong" line, and another where Olivia sings and plays the guitar alone, pure vocal technicality in which she is no longer afraid to show off.
The live performance ends up being enjoyable, even though too short (barely an hour with a break in between for them to be begged), but with only one album behind them, there wasn't much more to be done. The atmosphere was also quite warm (I had Finnish people in the seats near me). Here's a possible downside to the evening. The concert was in a theater, too tall and uncomfortable for seeing and listening.
Good.
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