No Ordinary Fool

With immediate effect, this site is no longer looking forward to gigs. Seriously. It always just ends up in tears these days. This week, we allowed ourselves to be steadily (and seriously) wound up at the prospect of bookending a week when Built To Spill blew the bloody doors off Whelan’s by seeing TV On The Radio give a wowing to end all wowings. Now, before somebody else can get the chance to jump down my bloggery thoat to make the self-evident point, it was partially a case of unrealistic expectations being shot down in flames. So sue me sideways.

Still, let us talk about what was sweet, sweet amour with the show. They opened with Young Liars, one of my favourite songs of theirs. Buried deep in the world’s wet womb we were by it. Things were still looking pretty good when I liked how third song Golden Age sounded. It is irrational, but there is something disconcerting about hearing David Bowie’s Golden Years in your head each time you listen to this one. Moving swiftly on, other main set highlights included the headbanging intensity of Wolf Like Me, the frenzied spill of lyrics that is Dancing Choose, and the eyes-shut swoop and soar of Stork & Owl.

The main problem with the show was how the blues sounded from down below in the pit. The mix bordered on the awful at times, with Tunde Adebimpe’s vocals buried deep under the blanket of noise that Dave Sitek was laying down in the corner. Moreover, maybe that enormous woolly beard of his was acting as a sound dampner, but Kyp Malone’s lips were moving, but little of anything that he was saying was audible, never mind comprehensible. Maybe we are too fussy around here, but it would be our contention that it is not unreasonable, when paying hard-earned money to attend a concert, that we are then able to hear it properly.

Annoyance at this was not helped then by the band departing the stage following DLZ and Satellite, with the main show having weighed in at comfortably under the hour mark. Now, it is acknowledged that this was the venue wanting to get its normal Saturday night punters and punterettes into the club by a certain hour. However, ten more minutes of TV On The Radio would always have been infinitely more preferable to the thirty minutes of the support act that we had been inflicted with earlier on. Fortunately, the encores were pretty damn good, with a selection from each of their three albums to date on offer in Love Dogs, A Method, and Staring At The Sun respectively.

Partially because we were a tad let down in the immediate aftermath of the show, our review-in-a-word afterwards was “perfunctory”. In hindsight, I would now conclude that, firstly, Polish beer does wonders for my mid-evening vocabulary and, secondly, there was quite a lot to savour in the show. It was just that this masticating dumb tongue had simply wanted more!