I do apologise for the lack of updates. Again, been a bit of a busy bee recently. Still am, actually. I is a gonna post more shizzle for yas all 2moz like. But first, here's my Foals/Esser review, untainted by the need to hack it down for the MTV2 website (God damn, how I hate having my creativity stifled by word counts. Pshaw!)
GONZO ON TOUR (MTV2): FOALS and ESSER, York Fibbers, 17/10/08
Tonight, deep in the bowels of the unforgivably claustrophobic, relentlessly humid pressure cooker that is York's Fibbers, 250 haircuts-with-legs stand poised, waiting for the sonic apocalypse. The band NME told them all to watch in 2008, Oxford's finest purveyors of indie-techno-reggae-punk Foals, are about to launch full throttle into their final eleven song set of the year, fresh from having sold out the 5,000-strong Brixton Academy the night before. You can almost taste the anticipation in the air... but first, we all have to get through Esser and boy, is it a struggle. Dressed by Morrissey and styled by James Dean, the lead singer shuffles his way through the performance, his eyes continually shifting to the high-profile MTV2 cameras that flank the stage, filming the show for broadcast. Connection with the audience is minimal -the guy's too busy making sure he looks good for TV. And therein lies the problem: everyone here knows tonight is little more than a publicity stunt, a vehicle for further exposure to the masses, but it is the band's duty to disguise that fact: to connect with the audience here, rather than the one sitting comfortably in their armchairs at home. Esser seem unable to grasp this concept, lethargically mumbling their way through their sprawling, genre-straddling set, and the incessant sampling certainly doesn't help matters: piano parts appear from behind a mixing desk, computerised drumbeats loop over and over when there's a perfectly playable set of drums onstage and, sin of all sins, VOCALS come blasting out of the speakers when there's no-one singing them. Closer 'Headlock', the only song the crowd knows, sees the singer barely approaching the mic to sing the chorus, allowing a sample OF HIS OWN VOICE to play instead. It's sheer laziness and only exposes the synthetic nature of the band: connecting with an audience is nigh on impossible when you don't address them yourself.
Thankfully, our headliners understand this fact. It's not a typical connection (you don’t get any drum solo handclaps in a Foals set, that’s for sure), but it's certainly a primal one. From the moment the first high-pitched chords of a frantic 'The French Open' are struck, there's a ferocity to the performance that almost defies belief. Onstage, the five band members face each other, playing with the urgency of a group with everything to prove: as if someone's holding a gun to their heads, forcing them to play for their lives. Offstage, the hipster crowd shake off the shackles of cool and slam flesh-first into one another, risking life and limb to immerse themselves in the music. This is far from a juxtaposition, however: this is symbiosis. Band and audience feed off one another in a relationship of almost dangerous intensity. Just check out the crowd-surfing to nowhere during a colossal 'Cassius', the spasmodic rage induced by a monstrous 'Hummer' or the ferocious animalism with which a jacked-up Yannis attacks his guitar and bonus snare drum during a monumental 'Electric Bloom'. This is the kind of show that venues like this were made for, the sort that turns into a sweaty, painful haze of a memory at night's end... but that you know was absolutely f*****g fantastic. It hardly even matters that they return to the stage to play a crowd-pleasing 'Two Steps Twice': Foals have already proved themselves twenty times over. And made us all forget there was ever a support band on in the first place. Job. Well. Done.
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