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Concert
Review by Nick Morgan |
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The
Bloomsbury Ballroom
Bloomsbury, London
August 11th 2008
This
is our first visit to the Bloomsbury
Ballroom. It’s one of Vince
Power’s joints, housed in the basement
of Victoria
House, a recently-refurbished 1930s office
building, originally built for the Liverpool
Victoria Friendly Society, which had begun
life in the 1840s to help low-paid workers save
for their funerals – it’s still the
UK’s largest friendly society offering a
range of financial services to its members. |
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| Quite
why they needed a ballroom isn’t clear (maybe
it was for morally-uplifting lectures about funeral
management) but when the building was redeveloped
a few years ago VPMG
leased the space and employed designer Shaun
Clarkson, who’s worked on many of their
venues (including the ghastly Pigalle), to give
it the full Art Deco treatment. Actually it feels
a bit more like a school assembly hall with twiddly
bits on the radiators than an Art Deco triumph of
the sort claimed by VPMG. But either way it’s
not the décor that the folks in the bar are
gasping at – open-mouthed with astonishment
– but rather the exorbitant prices being charged
for soft drinks and water, which is what this relatively
sober Monday night crowd are mostly going for. They’re
largely students, apart from the older, greyer and
heavier blokes scattered around the audience who
are all, strangely, scribbling into little black
notebooks. |
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| That’s
probably because we’re here to see California’s
Cold
War Kids, whose second album is just
about ready for release, so it’s a sneak preview
of this new material (played, it has to be said,
with uncompromising gusto) along with some old favourites
from their debut album, 2006’s Robbers and
Cowards. The Kids (mostly in their mid-twenties)
have been going for about four years, and having
toured almost without respite in the run-up to Robbers
and Cowards had built a considerable fan base, amplified
by a virtual blog-fuelled buzz. However it all went
a bit wrong for them when one album reviewer ‘outed’
the band as covert Christians, subversively injecting
religious messages into their songs, provoking something
of an ill-informed backlash. The fact that three
members of the band attended the same Catholic college
may well account for a heavy use of religious imagery
and language in some of their songs, but aside from
that it’s hard to see why they might be any
more closet-proselytisers than say Nick Cave, who’s
not short of the odd biblical metaphor himself.
What I would say is that for young men (albeit not
Kids) their songs are surprisingly intense, mature
and not a tad on the gloomy side. |
| And
if you might think they’re difficult to listen
to on disc, then that’s nothing compared with
the live performance, which is one of the most disrupted
and disruptive that I’ve seen for a long time.
Although musically quite different it even puts
the Gang of Four to shame – and is none the
less compelling for that, in fact quite the reverse.
Singer Nathan Willett’s voice is probably
best described as “agonised” –
seemingly a pleasantly twangy transatlantic rock
voice, he pushes it to the edge with a wailing falsetto
– like the characters in the songs, full of
self-doubt and uncertainty. |
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| When
he goes to the piano it’s more often to crash
out some discordant notes than to pick out a melody,
most of which are almost subverted by his wayward
keyboards and the guitar of Jonnie Russell. He’s
got a fantastic rich booming sound – no doubt
in part deriving from the DeArmond pickups on his
Harmony guitar (I can’t be sure but it looks
like a Rocket)
– but his playing is jerky, almost out of
time. Which is how he moves, although it’s
not as distracting as bassist Matt Maust, who roams
the stage with spastic motions, careering at will
into both Russell and Willett. It’s quite
a performance, dense, very intense, very powerful
and very impactful. |
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So if I knew their work better I might be able to
tell you what they played off the new album, Loyalty
to Loyalty, which is released any day soon. But
I don’t, and they certainly weren’t
helping by giving out song titles. Not enough time
for that. But they did play more than half the stuff
from Robbers and Cowards, perhaps a bit more poppy
than the newer material, but sufficient for me to
buy the album. And I’ll certainly get Loyalty
when it’s released. So should you. - Nick
Morgan (concert photographs by Kate) |
Check
the index of all reviews:
Nick's Concert Reviews
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There's nothing more down there... |
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