Review of The Naked And Famous at The Olympia Theatre, Dublin on November 13th
Review: Kevin Donnellan
Photos: Owen Humphreys
“Will they actually be naked?” deadpans a guy in the audience as we wait for the show to start. Unfortunately nothing so spectacular is in store for us. The Naked and Famous bring us a show that mirrors the band’s standing at the moment; interesting, promising but not yet close to great.
The debut album from the New Zealand five-piece produced a few lovely songs; nobody is going to complain about ‘Young Blood’, ‘Girls Like You’ or ‘Punching in a Dream’ appearing on a playlist. But in a live show the challenge for an emerging band is to make it about more than just waiting for the few singles. In this they only half succeeded.
We’ll start with the positives. Right from the off the band were willing to push away from the studio sound. Everything was a little louder, brasher. You still knew the songs but there was never any boring, rigid delivery. The opening numbers in particular were a welcome surprise., and for a band with a fine collection of music videos to their name (all by Campbell Hooper & Joel Kefali) they paid the visuals suitable attention; the lighting backdrop was at times spectacular and always appropriate.
So it looked good and at times sounded good, but what stopped it from being a great show? Well after a frenetic opening a pattern began to emerge in their songs. That pattern was, to put it into not-at-all-technical-terms, Quiet-Quiet-Loud. When it’s done well it can be enthralling, a slow, sometimes almost perversely slow, build-up before giving way to a big crashing finale. A great recent example would be Spanish Sahara by Foals. But on Sunday in the Olympia this trick was attempted a few too many times. Maybe three songs could fit the template in a single performance, but not half the setlist. The vocals were never clear enough to make the quiet parts suitably engaging. Thom Powers and Alisa Xayalit are two good vocalists (though clearly not big on banter with the audience) but that wasn’t showcased on Sunday night.
Perhaps all this is being a little harsh on the band though. With just two EPs and one album under their belts having an adoring, close-to-full house in the Olympia is no mean feat. The crowd seemed engaged throughout and the best known songs got a tremendous reception. Sure towards the end those of us to the right of the stage got the entertaining spectacle of a 6ft 5” man attempted to crowd surf (it didn’t go well).
Not every show needs to be spectacular to have been worth seeing. Sometimes it’s enough to see a few glimpses of magic and being fair about it The Naked and Famous have that. It will be interesting to see how this band develop on their second studio album, and it will be interesting to see how their live show develops. They have been on the ‘ones to watch’ list for the past 12 months and, in the nicest possible way, they deserve to stay there.