GIG REVIEW: Delays
- Posted on November 19, 2007 9:59 AM
- 0 comments
Delays
Hoxton Bar & Grill
15th November 2007
Review by Paul Beevers
I’m often a bit cynical when bands do a mini-tour of intimate venues to air new material. Aren’t they just unsure of their popularity after taking time out, and don’t want to risk playing to half empty concert halls?
If Delays had harboured such concerns they needn’t have worried. Tonight’s gig at the Hoxton Bar & Grill is the culmination of a six date tour of deliberately down-sized venues. And what happened? Every date sold out in next to no time, and tickets were immediately changing hands for five times their face value. So whilst Delays have already enjoyed chart success, the response to these dates must be reassuring for the band and their new-found employers at Polydor.
If they needed any more reassurance they were doing the right thing, tonight’s gig provided the evidence in spades. Of course a devotional audience of 200 fans, familiar with the entire Delays output were going to lap up every note. However, for the more objective observer there were real indications of greatness.
For starters, as a live act Delays are absolutely on top of their game. This is celestial, life-affirming indie pop from a band brimming with self-belief, yet maintaining a real humility and appreciation that people will pay to hear the stuff. Tonight they make the whole thing look like a whole load of fun and almost effortless. Other more successful acts living not a million miles from Hoxton would pride themselves on being shambolic. Delays don’t know the meaning of the word.
With two albums and a small clutch of Top 40 singles under their belts they already have a solid canon to fall back on. Opener ‘Long Time Coming’ and the closing ‘Valentine’ are sure-fire crowd pleasers and the band know it. However, it’s the new songs destined for third album ‘Everything’s The Rush’ which really hit the spot tonight. Their trademark sound remains largely intact which will please the more mature punters, drawn by early comparisons to The Byrds, The Cocteau Twins and The Stone Roses. Supplement those core values with fantastically fluid bass lines, washes of glittering electronica and Greg Gilbert’s better-than-ever falsetto and the formula already sounds good.
And then there’s the tunes. The titles will mean more when the album surfaces in early 2008, suffice to say ‘Pieces’ and ‘Keep It Simple’ sound like potential singles and future pop classics. New EP tracks ‘Love Made Visible’ and ‘Panic Attacks’ strike a similar uplifting vein, destined surely to have festival crowds in raptures next summer.
What we have here then are four young men from Southampton who have honed and polished their already impressive art, written some killer tunes and rehearsed them to perfection. On stage they appear super-confident and they’ve every right to be. Never self-consciously fashionable but armed with a whole stack of 21st century pop gems, 2008 might just be the year when Delays join the big league. It’s no more than they deserve.
For tickets and dates, check out Delays on Seatwave
www.thedelays.co.uk
www.myspace.com/delays
www.youtube.com/DelaysWorld
We chatted to Greg from the Delays about his most memorable gig ever. Check out his response.
The Delays released their ultra-limited edition fan-only EP on Monday, 12th November. Check out the suitably messy video for 'Love Made Visible' below.
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