The Beat Surrender

I always think it’s a bit of a strange experience when you are seeing a band between albums. While on the one hand you get the pleasure of getting to hear the new material and compare it to the previous output, the songs also haven’t taken on a life of their own yet, something which happens with repeated plays.

The ends result of this is that the sets can sometimes feel a little disjointed and that’s certainly not a criticism of the band, they are after all about to release some of the new material in the forthcoming months and naturally want to road test the material on their audience, plus I’d imagine they want to keep things interesting for themselves, it must get tiring playing some of the same songs hundreds of times over.

As I’ve alluded to The Rifles are between albums with their sophomore effort not yet in the shops, for those worrying that they may have gone emo, folk or dance you can rest easy, life in The Rifles is kind of as it was really, belting out track after track of Jam influenced guitar pop.

This is something they do very well, so I suppose there isn’t really a need to change, the problem tonight is that we get a roughly fifty-fifty split in new and old material. So while She’s Got Standards, Peace And Quiet, She’s The Only One, Repeated Offender and the brilliant Spend A Lifetime are superbly well received, they stand out a mile from the other tracks.

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