Venue:
Tramshed, Cardiff
Date: 02/08/2016
Didn’t arrive in the best of moods for this – horrid driving weather and confusing parking directions. ended up parking on the street which i noticed was Resident’s parking so I resigned myself to a fine…and then got to the Venue and the band had started early – unheard of!
Anyway, the Tramshed is a nicely done up shed – and the politest security ever. As the band had just started I may have missed any introductions but there wasn’t a lot of chat with the audience until the end. No matter. Slowly Low got me unwound with their strange mixture of guitar thrash and fragile melody. No support they played 2 sets – most of last year’s album Ones & Sixes plus a popular selection from the back catalogue. Not many laughs or histrionics (the odd puff of dry ice and coloured lights felt almost sarcastic) but highly atmospheric – makes me think of stopping by woods – lovely dark and deep. The feel exemplified for me by one of my favourite songs from last year “What Part of Me”(which I discovered very late) – a brilliant pop song.
The very polite security wished us goodnight as we left and the car was ticket-less so thank you Cardiff. Horrible rain but I was already de-stressed for the drive home on the M4.
The audience:
Attentive, appreciative – and one very excitable whistler (too loud, man) Not as many hipster beards or tats as Bristol.
It made me think..
Worth the effort and stress – I apologise to the residents of Clare Street for impinging on their parking. I’m off to read some Robert Frost
Tried to attach this
and this
http://www.internal.org/Robert_Frost/Desert_Places
Envious. Great band, getting better.
I’m relatively new to them but a prodigious body of work – and I speak as someone who tends to prefer jingle-jangle guitar pop. Not without humour either viz
well i thought it was funny…peculiar. Let is now, let is now, let it snow…!
IT!!!!!!
Great review, and it pretty much describes Liverpool tonight as well. I must admit I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as the last two times I saw them, at Liverpool and Manchester cathedrals. Somehow those spaces suited their unsparing, austere music and low key stage presence. But it was still superb and all the elements that make them such a special band were present and correct – Parker’s transcendent vocals, Sparhawk’s compelling guitar, the harmonies between the two, the brilliantly constructed build up of each song by the trio. One overheard comment in the interval summed it up nicely -‘it’s intense, isn’t it? They’re not playing the songs, they’re crafting them note by note.’
They’re almost more like a classical or jazz trio than a rock and roll band. And whilst they may work with a limited palate, they use it to impeccable and brilliant effect.
I ‘m also late to Low, last 18 months. I would love to have seen them live and I could have but the nattering classes have put me off. In the past I have always addressed the problem with these tosses but to have done so gets me wound up and unable to enjoy the show.
That dosen’t mean I don’t attend shows anymore, got Wilco, Ryley Walker, Moulettes and Van Morisson lined up. Two of those will be too loud to be bothered the other two I will take the idiots on.
Have to say it was the most well behaved audience I have seen in ages at Liverpool – very quiet and attentive, almost to a fault.
Know what you mean. Even the guy (I assume the whistler) at cardiff who kept shouting for “Sunflower” kept doing it after they played it. Post modern or what?