BBC6 Music Festival
Honeyblood/Grandaddy/The Shins
O2 Academy, Glasgow
Lisa-Marie Ferla
four stars
DESPITE the early set from Honeyblood, night two at the Academy was firmly billed at music fans of a certain age who listened to a lot of US indie in the early noughties.
Jason Lytle of Grandaddy’s voice can be a bit of an acquired taste on record. Live, it plays up to and enhances the weirdness of the band’s songs, helping jaunty little synth lines veer from joyful to just a little bit creepy.
When it’s good, it’s wonderful: the hurdy-gurdy AM 180 lurches, trippy, like a claustrophobic trapped in a box room, while comeback single Way We Won’t packs a party into its killer riff. But on longer songs like Disconnectly and Lost on Yer Merry Way that weirdness gets stretched out into meandering self-indulgence and the riffs sound like an ancient fairground ride being run into the ground.
Their new album may be only a fortnight old, but The Shins’ frontman James Mercer is under no illusions about what the people have come to hear. Kissing the Lipless remains the giddy burst of bubblegum it was in 2003, and although we have to wait until the encore for New Slang the beautiful, stripped back version is worth the wait.
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