Radar: A Northern Light - Speakeasy, Belfast
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A Northern Light, Go Wolf, Charles Hurts
Speakeasy, Belfast
Thurs 3rd May 2012
Opening in a sparsely populated room are , reportedly named as a parody of a local business. Unfortunately, their music occasionally verges upon parody, so heavily influenced to the point of pastiche by artists such as The Smiths and Richard Hawley, who themselves tread in footsteps of 1950s and 60s pop such as Buddy Holly and The Shadows. One song with disaffected, detached vocals over layered dirty, distorted, effected guitar is great, two is fine, but three is starting to push it unless you’re pairing up Marr and Morrissey in their prime. When it’s practically the whole set, boredom inevitably sets in. Add in a lack of flexibility from working with a laptop, as well as a lack of on-stage charisma, and it merges into a forgettable blur. Comparisons have been made with Joy Division, but that group have always been described as having a compelling urgency and desperation which is entirely absent here. I suppose we should applaud their bravery in going against the local indie grain, but when it’s done with so little apparent self-belief, it’s hard to get behind it.
Following that to a fuller room are , bringing the more common sound of summer tinged synthy indie-pop. It’s the usual suspects – MGMT, Foster The People or more locally, Two Door Cinema Club and Kowalski - but it’s not quite as purely pop. There’s wistfulness to ‘Darling Don’t Leave Me’ which has stadium written all over it, a cross between MGMT and Kings of Leon, combining potential epic sing-along chorus with a dancing beat. Forthcoming single ‘Voices’ is bass-heavy and dance-floor friendly with cow-bells a-plenty, deviating from the formula into DFA territory. There are some nice ideas being worked on here, and seems evident that they may develop into something as they find their own path.
We shift direction again to , with certain words coming to mind repeatedly during their set: stadium, pop-rock, unashamed, American, uplifting, epic, joyful. They’ve found what they want to do and are trying to do it as well as possible, and whilst there isn’t the largest crowd present, this doesn’t discourage them from acting as though it’s a giant stage and crowd. Upcoming single ‘Pilgrim’ is bounce-along stadium rock, and ‘The Right Thing To Do’ goes for the epic with big rock drums all over the place. The unrelenting and unchanging nature of what they do does grate after a while, but their infectious enthusiasm helps to keep our interest. The one off-note is the inevitable ‘walk-off-stage-before-coming-back-for-an-encore’ moment; unnecessary tonight, given the smallish crowd, and the lone song of that encore, ‘Show Me Your Soul’ should have been incorporated into the set to allow the well-executed looped feedback ending of ‘Thanatosis’ to be the ending. But given all that went before, we can forgive them for that.
William Johnston
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