Although the half dozen members of The Besnard Lakes found room to squeeze onto Whelan’s tiny little stage, it was the soundman that became the centre of attention, quickly establishing himself as the focal point for the evening. For all his efforts (throughout the night he would position himself in various spots amongst the crowd in one long, continuous attempt to get the levels right), his frequent tweakings made little impact and often co-lead-singer Olga Goreas could not be heard at all. So between the frantic gesturing from band members and the constant turning of baffled heads in the audience, eyes seemed to be rarely off the engineer’s mixing desk.
That the material would suffer, then, seemed inevitable. But the patchy sound cannot be solely to blame. For despite seeming relatively pleased to be there and clearly at ease enough to slug back the beers at leisure, there felt a distinct lack of presence on stage, a shortage of energy that couldn’t help but pale in comparison to the output levels on their latest album, “The Dark Horse” – surprisingly one of the brightest releases so far in 2007.
Ultimately the performance was more unremarkable than disappointing, and certainly enough to pass without much comment. That was, until I read one paper’s account of the performance which took this notion of saying as little as possible to the extreme by passing absolutely no observations on the night whatsoever. Instead, it simply centred on a superficial comparison between the band and Arcade Fire (both are from Montreal, are fronted by a husband-wife partnership, and…have various members…playing instruments), thus smacking of a case of a journalist forgetting to attend said concert before later being reminded of his obligation to review it just before deadline.
So, for posterity’s sake, if nothing else, I will leave you with one representative image from that show; and it’s not of six band members huddling together for one triumphant, harmonius chorus of “dev-a-sta….tion,” it’s of the audience texting away on their phones, or engaging their other half in an argument over flirtatious strangers…it’s of realising that you can’t really take any issue with these kind of distractions because, truth be told, your mind is elsewhere too. The magic just wasn’t there and it’s a shame, because this is an album that promises exactly that.
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