主播大秀

I have no time for people who moan about an artist choosing to play new material at a show - you know, the sort of people who don't like Radiohead's Kid A. So, to clarify: it isn't Yann Tiersen's song selection that left me disappointed, but the presentation of the new songs.

His new record, Dust Lane, is played almost in full tonight, and the album itself marks a shift in Tiersen's sound: it's his first "rock" 听
record. A lot of the playfulness and orchestration so central to his early work has been replaced by more conventional structures and sounds, and it's telling enough that the title and songs ('Dark Stuff', 'Till the End') are in English for the first time. But the record itself at least makes good use of texture, of dynamics, with some neat arrangements. Almost all of these merits are lost in the live show.

It's as if rock music is more difficult than it looks. The classically trained Tiersen (who, amusingly for stereotype fans, is wearing a black and white striped shirt) spends almost the whole gig playing electric guitar, and it just feels like a waste. While previous live shows saw him hop between instruments constantly, tonight the whole band is static - nervous, perhaps, on the first night of a tour? Whatever the reason, they play most of the Dust Lane material as straightforward, would-be epic rock music. At times we could be watching any generic indie band - we are variously treated to predictable post-rock dynamics and laddish swagger, the band unsubtly thrashing away at their instruments like it's closing night at Glastonbury. For a composer of Tiersen's talent, it's tragic.

Nobody expected the entire Am茅lie soundtrack. And in order to keep creating, any artist is going to want to evolve. At times I was reminded of the Bob Dylan show at the Odyssey a few years back when a clearly bored Bob sat behind a piano all night and played about two hours of ridiculous boogie-woogie. Two songs from Les Retrouvailles ('Kala', sans Liz Fraser obviously, and 'A Secret Place' with Tiersen singing Stuart Staples' part) and a brilliant violin solo with elements of Sur le Fil are as much as we get from his back-catalogue, the rest of the set coming from Dust Lane (like the tiresome 'Palestine', whose lyrics are the word 茂驴陆Palestine' spelled out: political!) and a handful of unreleased songs. The band themselves occasionally add something special - the synth work at times sounds like Jonny Greenwood's Ondes Martenot, and if you can play a saxophone and not sound stupid you're doing something right - but for the most part they simply plod along perfunctorily: bass, guitar, drums, boring.

An unexpected highlight is the finale of 'F*** Me', a glorious, swirling pop song and a hint at what might have been, spoiled only by a slightly underwhelming first encore, and a very underwhelming second encore, which takes place to a half-full Mandela Hall, a good chunk of the crowd having wandered off.

Niall Harden