Review of Glasvegas at The Academy, Dublin on April 28th 2011
Review by James Hendicott
Photos by Alessio Michelini
The title ‘NME’s favorite band’ isn’t one to carry around lightly. Too often – in recent years – bestowed upon six-month flash in the pans whose fame crawls largely from the pages of the magazine itself, Glasvegas are quickly becoming an exception to a well-worn rule. The dark-tinged cult Scots are nothing if not intriguing.
Tonight they storm the Academy stage in a way few other bands could replicate. There’s a futuristic feel to the set up, with charismatic front man James Allan strutting and flexing around his luminous mic cable and drummer Jonna bouncing around in her seat behind him. The entire stage is backlit, with a fan firing artificial smoke over the band’s head, while guitarist and bassist take up almost anonymous positions either side of Allan, quiet yet technically exceptional foils to their flamboyant, backlit singer.
Tonight set has a heavy focus on the band’s new material, a fact for which Allan is pointedly apologetic, yet latest album EUPHORIC /// HEARTBREAK \\\ is sublimely atmospheric live, a twist into a more instrumental-ish sound that’s not quite reached on their rockier self-titled debut. While a full set of just the new album might fall short, tracks like ‘Dream, Dream, Dreaming’ and ‘Pain Pain, Never Again’ are like toned-down wall-of-sound calling cards, and they send us into a state of dreamy, drifting bliss.
For most of the audience, of course, it’s the popular debut that’s offering the moments of leap-around euphoria. At their best, Glasvegas’ downbeat, slurring verses give way to truly epic choruses, leaping into spectacular crescendos that the assembled throng seem to know so well that Allan no longer need to sing. In fact, for the duration of a manic ‘It’s my own cheating heart that makes me cry’, Glasvegas are performing almost entirely instrumentally, with Allan adding only the briefest of words whilst weaving about the stage, head in hands, clearly loving every second.
His charisma is on max tonight. While the rest of the band can largely be dismissed as instrumental backing – though they do it incredibly well – Allan spends the fast songs mingling with the front row, kissing the girls pressed up against the barrier or patting the photographers on the head as they stumble around trying to keep up with him. He drops to his haunches for the verses, and rises up to his full height for the crescendos, leaping onto tiptoes and screaming the houses down. The vocals of the slower tracks are subtler, lacking the angst that often permeates Glasvegas at their peak, but dropping in some heavily morphed, rock-out renditions of tracks like The Ronette’s ‘Be My Baby’, the most unlikely of covers.
If Glasvegas have a real ‘hit’, it’s the intensely personal ‘Daddy’s Gone’, and it’s saved ‘til last, the final glorious glimmer of beauty amid a set that has to go down as one of the best in The Academy’s recent history. It’s not a patch on the pre-encore closer, though. ‘Go Square Go’ sees The Academy, launch into its simple refrain – “Here we go, here we go, here we fucking go” – with a passion until the Scots step back on to stage. They might be greeted with calls of ‘we can’t understand you’ – true for the minority, no doubt – but those thick Glasgow accents fit perfectly with such an intense, darkly tinged style of feedback-driven rock. It’s a big, brash beast of a show, and we couldn’t ask for a single thing more.
