Three hundred Tuesday nights out with cultivated disheveledness, good teeth and prospects are milling about in Leeds Cockpit. It's nine o'clock, the bar's empty and the last technician is searching for sounds of life in the microphones. The venue is comfortably well occupied and there's a gently suppressed excitement in the air.
We find the front, confirm that Leeds' INFRASOUND did a decent job as first on and the main event gets going. Four modest blokes walk on with friendly smiles and nods of recognition to faces in the crowd. They look at home and at ease. THE SHINING and their crowd are distinctly the same kinds of people. There's a good balance of male and female in the room. Leeds/ Manchester rivalry notwithstanding, it feels like a local event among friends, and the good party feeling persists throughout the set. There are outbreaks of joining in with the songs that tell us that we have happy album customers present.
Singer Duncan Baxter comes on part way into the opening number, with a very Manchester vibe pulsing hypnotically from the band. His sinewy, twitchy presence excites the front rows into squeals of greeting. His voice is strong and bluesy. Leeds' THE MUSIC played over the road from here last week with a remarkably similar sound but a bigger crowd. The obvious invitation is to dance: the audience want to gawp. There are flurries of shaky hand waving and bobbing up and down, like the fitful October wind outside. But the band's steady 4/4 - with no obvious signs of therapeutic ingestion among the crowd - means that the gale doesn't get above Force 5.
The well-paced set goes through nearly the whole of the "True Skies" album, and shows it off to good effect. The vibe is very consistent. There are changes: slower, quicker, louder, quieter in turn: but they're indiscernible by post-rock standards. It's a similar pattern each time, with no surprises to excite or terrify. Chunks of two and four bar phrases are lined up for rhythmic exploitation and emotional vocal outbursts. In "Got A Feeling" at the end there's a fresh sounding foray out into funkishness.
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At the heart, Simon Jones' energy from bass guitar and spontaneous and unmic'ed harmony singing drive it all along. It's optimistic and celebratory music, designed to appeal to a warm-hearted and undemanding audience. It would be a great show for a local band to be putting on for their friends and community. But if we're describing a tour with major funding and serious ticket prices, a different standard has to apply (even if UK promoters and labels have temporarily lost sight of the fact.) The guitar and keyboard playing is functionally right, but it's all entry level; unimaginative stuff. Drums are standard rock fills without any expressive or provocative power.
Everything is played with commitment and clarity, but without inspiration. Duncan's voice soars and roars in all the right places, but he only finds one real tune ("Young Again") and his lyrics don't add up to much. And like Robert Harvey in The Music, he finds himself scaling octaves and semi-dancing to disguise the same neo-melodic phrases endlessly looped and recycled.
But let's face it, it is dance music, it's not supposed to be clever. The problem tonight is that most of the audience haven't been dancing. On top of that, the national songwriting famine shows no sign of letting up.
(PICS: WILL SAUNDERS)
SET LIST:
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PLANET/ QUICKSILVER/ SHOW YOU THE WAY/ FIND A REASON/ CREST OF AN OCEAN/ FIND YOUR WAY HOME/ YOUNG AGAIN/ UNTIL THE END/ GOT A FEELING/ DANGER (Encore).
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