Live Review

Noah And The Whale – Roundhouse, Camden

• 27th Jul 2011

Noah and the Whale don’t rest on the laurels at the Roundhouse and really do remake their songs on stage to jump to, even if the content of their songs do make you want to withdraw to the corner of a dimly lit room for a good old fashioned amount of foetal position rocking. Emerging not too many years ago with the summer folk-pop hit ‘Five Years Time’, their songs now offer something perhaps with a greater edge of maturity, writing songs with solemnity, but not so dark that they can’t be played on Radio 1. Occasionally songs float towards the epic sound of Beirut, but withdraw to the broad-based ‘appeal-to-everyone’ lyricism of Coldplay. ‘This is a song for anyone with a broken heart’, a line from Blue Skies, feels too insufferably broad. But I don’t want to enjoy this song with so many people. Maybe I’m too insular, but it feels too public.

But to be frank the concert had more passion than the new album in the studio, adding a more roar, more passionate performance than the cool, and at times, blandness of a modern Bruce Springsteen album. A case in point was the excellently performed “Tonight’s The Kind of Night” which got the crowd jumping in a rather civilised manner that you get at London gigs. The catchy violin of “Just Me Before We Met” getting the audience nodding their heads as well. The problem with the transition over to being a more conventional indie band is that it is less inventive than they were as the nu-folk band offering something different at the time. It might be well orchestrated and tidily produced, but it has blandness at its heart that they didn’t earlier. That said, big singles like “Waiting for the Chance to Come” and “L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N.”  still have something to them, though a lot of the set, save songs like the beautiful and naive “Rocks and Daggers”, did feel like album filler.

The unifying aspect of the two incarnations of the band with is the lead Charlier Fink’s odd deep, vaguely Americanised voice, though I’ve always been unnerved by the odd accent he has. The Americanised voice has this lingering inauthenticity, which to a degree matches the band’s new output, an inauthentic indie band. However, with the Roundhouse’s amazing sound and the crowd up for a last hurrah before Monday, it was a nice gig. Though this sounds vaguely schizophrenic, it comes primarily from how the band has manoeuvred itself to a new position from the area that popularised them, with a debatable degree of success.

P.S. A band to look out for where the support Fixers, whose song Crystals could be a definite on the indie summer playlist.