Weekly > Reviews
Athlete - Leeds University
The first time I saw Athlete was back in June 2003, supporting REM at Old Trafford Cricket Ground, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I thoroughly enjoyed their set. The sun was shining and the beer was flowing, it was the perfect setting for Athlete’s brand quirky, breezy pop.
Nearly two years on and I wasn’t exactly relishing seeing the Deptford foursome at the vacuum of sound that calls itself Leeds University Union. The lush, open space of the Lancashire cricket ground had been replaced by the narrow, dingy and soulless cafeteria that moonlights as a (bad) venue, and those summery pop songs have been overtaken by well, bollockless ballads. Nethertheless, I was intrigued to see if they could transfer their sound to this new enviroment.
They really couldn’t have gotten off to a more boring start. Tourist opener,Chances, like the majority of the new songs is a plodder that attempts to sound epic, but fails hugely. To be fair, it might have achieved a bit more epic-ness had Joel’s vocals been a lot louder. Not a very good way to begin though, and I haven’t even mentioned the lyric, Like the pos…..ter/of Berlin on my wall/maybe there’s a chance our walls might fall, which I don’t think I need to comment on.
A one from Vehicles and Animals, one from Tourist pattern seemed to emerge from here, which only served to give the set a disjointed feel, as there is such a contrast between the feel of each album.
- Athlete
- Leeds University (March 3rd, 2005)
- Category: Live
- Label: Parlophone
- Support: Ian Archer, Stephen Fretwell
- Reviewed by: Small Beer
- Published on: 12 Mar 2005
- Comments: 0
- Beat Surrender Rating:
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Songs from their debut album such You Got The Style, Westside, and even Vehicles and Animals seemed to get the crowd excited, but Athlete aren’t really a band that thrives on big audience sing-a-longs – they don’t exactly play an intense set of Embrace style anthems. When they finally had their chance to really give it to the fans with the full blown, psychedelic wall of noise at the end of Beautiful – which was incidentally the final song, they bottled it, instead deciding to end the gig after the ridiculously tame chorus.
That really summed up the night, which in short was a bland and wholly uninspiring affair. Next time I see Athlete, I hope that I’m sitting down in the warm sun clutching a plastic glass of cold lager. I appreciate how boring that sounds, but some bands just don’t make music for jumping up and down to, and Athlete are one of them.
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