Dalliance.co.uk

Morrissey at St George's Hall, Bradford

Morrissey

It is said that Morrissey's set at Glastonbury did not raise much of a note against the back drop of Beyonce but tonight Steven is on familiar ground.

Playing to an audience mostly advancing in years it might be seventeen years since the one time The Smiths front man was hosted in thus venue or this city but should he cast his eye over the faces that yodel back at the singer must feel on familiar ground.

Morrissey knows his audience and plays appropriately. Six The Smith tracks and a smattering of his modern stomp alongs are raucously received. The lighter moments of There Is A Light That Never Goes Out float over the heads of the beer guzzling sort who sing football songs between tracks.

It's difficult to recall sometimes just how insanely important The Smiths songs seemed on a personal level. They were Zeitgeist, they moved the person you were, informed the person you wanted to be.

Perhaps the gang mentality that weaves through of Morrissey's songs - and is seen in his backing band - attract the sort of element which missed that formative isolation which many years ago the Mancunian singer seemed to be all about avoiding. Morrissey is all about gangs, and leading them, and to illustrate that while he shimmers in a purple shirt the six men behind him dress identically in t-shirt emblazoned with the words Fuck Fur.

Morrissey is at his most effective when cast as the outcast leader. I Want The One I Can't Have still crackles with anti-authoritarianism and there is a stunned silence to the images of slaughter and animal cruelty projected behind Meat Is Murder.

It is there that Morrissey has risen to his full height as the reminder. The tap on the back or hand on the shoulder that recalls a person changed by time, and age, but who had nurtured dreams of something else.

Set list on Setlist.fm

Belle and Sebastian at O2 Academy, Leeds

"This is the last night of the tour, so we won't be seeing each other for a while, indulge us."

Belle and Sebastian

So Belle and Sebastian's Stuart Murdoch enjoys working through a few of the band's less well know numbers at Leeds having indulged the audience with Juno favourite Piazza, New York Catcher. There is talking loud throughout it because this is Leeds, and sometimes the music drowned out what must be a series of important conversations which buzz around.

I've always wondered what bands do between tours. Record, one supposes, but seemingly not together. We have a myth, us music fans, of the band as best mates living in one comedy house. It's not true, but we have to believe bands like each other, and us.

The latter seems a problem from the seats high in the O2 Academy - I'm not going on that floor again if I can help it - and while the band show no disdain or distaste towards their audience there is not the connection that seemed to mark the Manchester gig in December.
instead there are a few trips to areas one might not expect. Le Pastie De La Bourgeoisie is not often heard, nor is Slow Graffiti.

The band must out the lavish set of Manchester, no I Fought In A War here, but finish pairing Judy And The Dream of Horses with Me And The Major so people exit happy.

They have a reputation as being a hit and miss band do and perhaps it is justified but to me they seem more like a symbiotic act going their best when they get something from the audience which is missing tonight.

The band go their separate ways, the audience do too. On the night they never really came together.

Set list on Setlist.fm

Sufjan Stevens at Apollo, Manchester

Sufjan Stevens

For the initiated imagine this: Paul Simon and Bowie circa Ziggy Stardust collaborating and neither being prepared to compromise. That is Sufjan Stevens.

An acoustic guitar and a sweetly pitched voice verbalising esoteric lyrics Stevens is the man who performs songs with titles like Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois and lyrics which reflect that deliberate curiosity he stands at the front of the stage of Manchester's Apollo and communicates something small and private to his audience. His audience significant too, he is a cult for sure, but a sizeable one.

But those moments are interleaved with an utterly constructed, garish, and in the very truest sense of the word awe inspiring show which begins with Seven Swans and Stevens sporting a pair of Swans wings that recall the horrors of David Peece's Red Riding as much as any dreaminess. There is neon on the stage, and dancing girls who danced just the right side of unprofessional to maintain the general edge of unease.

There are videos and curious artwork. There are lights and balloon. It is - frankly - unexpected. Much of it stems from the experimental electronic music of The Age of Adz which clashes viciously with (Come On Feel The) Illinoise and at the heart of the contradiction is Stevens. Cutting away from showmanship with hints at irony but never reveals itself Stevens delivers a cover of R.E.M.'s The One I Love at whisper quiet volume.

It is the tension at the heart of Stevens' duality which is so fascinating. He is neither the shoddy showman nor the simple acoustic artist or he is both but the violent clash is awesome to behold.

Breathless, and unlike anything else.

Last.fm link for images from Flickr and set list on setlist.fm.

The Answering Machines supporting The Radio Dept. Future Everything at The Deaf Institute, Manchester

The Radio Dept.

The Radio Dept. were to feature in the first Dalliance review five years ago - they cancelled the gig – and have remained elusive since. The proposal of seeing them in one of the North's best venue The Deaf Institute in Manchester seemed to promise more than it could ever deliver.

The Swedes take their blend of fuzzed up guitar, circa-1988 electronic backing and whispered lyrics on the road infrequently but in the last year seemed to up output from the studio with both studio album Clinging to a Scheme and collection Passive Aggressive emerging from Lund.

The Answering Machine

Before that is Manchester's The Answering Machine who take a risk with their set playing to the main band's fans with collection of song's to match the mood. They are less energetic than previously and will have better nights than this.

Which is not to say that the three guys and a gal do not make a good noise, but they seem ill at ease with what they are doing where as they have looked so comfortable.

Then The Radio Dept. The four piece appear as a three - one reportedly not liking touring at all, causing the cancellation of the last set of Northern English gigs in 2006 - shuffling onto stage to take up guitar, bass and keyboard. There is a duskiness to proceedings as the bright sunlight that bathed their support fades.

Interaction is brief between anticipatory audience and seemingly criminally shy band. Occasionally instructions are passed to the sound man but these come in Swedish, which is apologised for.

A rich catalogue is reduced with little mercy. Domestic Scene starts the gig with a hush and a reverence. Three songs in and The New Improved Hypocrisy has both band and audience in comfort zones.

The fuzz of guitar both hides and reveals. Enveloping the band in a pocket of hissing The Radio Dept. seem to seep into the mind rather than enter the head through the ears. They are a sense more than a sensation, more reaction than a realisation.

In lament 1995 there is a hunt at why the Swedes distance themselves from their audience. It is in the crack of the voice on the line "Although I'm happier now I always go sometimes/back to 1995."

After 1995 there is an ease in the auditorium. Worst Take In Music is applauded from the first mention, Heaven's On Fire is a small scale Livin' On A Prayer. It is easy street for the band now having tentatively exposed a crack from which one could glimpse of their heart, their soul;

As with a dream though that crack is fleeting, and perhaps never happened. Perhaps it was just the mind playing tricks, filling in the gaps of hazy half memory.

They depart the stage not to return. No encore, which unsettled some but seems some how apt. If The Radio Dept. capture the feel of a dream then the sudden end completes that.

The judder back into the world, the sense of remembering something more in emotion.

The idea at the back of your mind that you just cannot bring into focus but that swirl in your head, setting your mood for days to come.

Okkervil River

In a lull before the mid-year release of I Am Very Far what does one expect from a b-side - if there is such a thing any more - from the band that the world seems to have passed up in favour of The National that are Okkervil River?

Probably not this, a tune which seems to have seeped out of the cracks between what the band - superb at the best of times - want to do and want to avoid. It has a richness for sure and Will Sheff's vocals are always bled from the soul but there is something in the lilt of the singers voice.

Being able to write a line like "In the ambulance lamps of his eyes/and the smell of black blood on the backs of his hands/I could tell that his world can’t be mine." harms not the vocal but there is a sweet reflection and tenderness that swirls around the rising sounds that reach back to Brian Wilson, Pet Sounds and an era of American music often imitated but seldom advanced.