Photo: WENN
Those who made the trip down to Mile End last night having been seduced by the sedentary listening experience of Everyday Robots could’ve been forgiven for thinking they’d queued in the rain only to gain access to the wrong gig.
With a rhythm section that brings together frenetic beats and gut-resonating bass, Damon Albarn’s band, The Heavy Seas, aren’t quite the proposition you’d expect based on the record they’ve been formed to perform. 'Lonely Press Play', for example has an almost aggressive bounce in its live incarnation – one that quite belies the blissed out sulking of the single.
The band sound even more looming when they take on songs from Damon’s previous projects. The Good, The Bad and The Queens’s 'Kingdom of Doom' is all demonic organ trills and vicious crunching guitar – the bass line growling at a dub frequency. They sound like The Specials might have if you swapped the ghost town of Coventry for the hell-portal of Sunnydale. Of course, it’s not one track. There are lovely variations in tone throughout the gig as Damon makes the most of his voice-of-a-generation pulling power to shake things up.
He has Kano to guest on a buffed up version of Gorillaz early hit, 'Clint Eastwood', and a gospel choir on hand to bring 'Mr. Tembo' (a song written for a Baby Elephant) to life. His string section are more than just eye candy, and the arrangements on 'Heavy Seas of Love' and set closing Brit-pop anthem 'This Is a Low' add a lot.
That said, you can’t help but feel that the more enlivened moments are there to make sure it’s a show – that people can sit through it without being overcome by the beatific bleakness that Albarn really, deep down wants to inflict. That’s why his piano led solo performance of 'Out of Time' is probably, for all its other bells and whistles, the set's best moment.
