Gig Review: Midlake at Manchester Academy 3, November 1, 2006

I was encouraged by a friend to listen to Midlake’s most recent offering, The Trials of Van Occupanther, which it turns out, is a lovely album, despite sounding an awful lot like the folkier side of Neil Young. It is, however, a very quiet, laid back affair, all full of folky harmonies and gentleness. I was expecting their live performance to be a bit more dynamic, a bit rockier, much in the way that going to see My Morning Jacket is always much noisier and outgoing than you’d expect, at least from the pre-Z-era material. I was, sadly, wrong in my expectations.

Now, it’s been a bit of a bad week over at Indie Cred HQ, bad enough that we didn’t make it down to Sufjan Stevens on the 2nd, and I’m really having trouble even recalling much more than a few impressions of the set. One thing I can tell you was I preferred opener Robert Gomez to the main event. He was a bit too much Jose Gonzales in sound – quiet, sincere singer songwriter with sparse arrangements. But he was clearly an accomplished guitarist, and it was nice.

Midlake, however, very much failed to impress. It’s not that they didn’t sound good – they played well, although I was plagued throughout the set by some very low-level feedback. That may be the result of my new earplugs – The Ledge didn’t notice it. But they were, to put it bluntly, a bit boring. The songs sounded exactly, and I do mean exactly, as they do on the album. They were quiet, laid back, sincere, and altogether lacking in that chaotic spontenaity that good live bands bring to their shows. They also did not, as it were, “rock out.” At all. I guess I was hoping for a bit more dynamism from the tracks, to see a bit of emotional investment beyond the soft, withdrawn atmosphere of the record. It’s not to say the gig was bad, it wasn’t really. It just was not remotely memorable.

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