St George’s Church, 7th March 2009
Who says live shows all have to be the same? Coming down to Brighton as part of their Club Silencio tour, Noah and the Whale transformed St George’s Church in Kemptown into a makeshift cinema and demonstrated that you don’t need a budget the size of Bono’s self righteousness to pull off a unique, memorable gig.
In order to further push the illusion of a cinematic experience, all through the night the perfectly decorated projection screen set up behind the stage played out short films from France, New Zealand and England (all with clear influences from the David Lynch films from which the tour takes it name), minimising the time normally spent obsessing over the best way to stand without both legs falling off. During the two acts (opener Jay Jay Pistolet and the headliners), further clips were played that were edited and put together by Noah and the Whale frontman Charlie Fink, as well as some short films from Future Shorts, which altogether gave the evening a feel of a grand spectacle.
With a new album set to be released later in the year, Noah and the Whale were keen to test out some of the newer material on the eager crowd. Dwelling largely on heartbreak and loss, the newer songs while poignant and given incredible depth by Fink’s emotive delivery, perhaps took over too large a portion of the set. The more upbeat numbers such as “Rocks and Daggers” and the buoyant nursery rhyme simplicity of “5 Years Time” clearly garnered the most active audience response, with everybody’s feet doing a little jig under their pews.
Closing on an encore of “5 Years Time”, which saw a film made up of people either dancing or playing along to the song run behind them, followed by a track from the forthcoming album, the band have clearly garnered a unique feel for this tour. It shows that if all acts were to embrace experimentation as well as Noah and the Whale have, going to see live shows would be just that little bit better. But then again not everyone would have thought folk, obscure surrealist cinema and church would have gone so well together.
Words by Dave Drummond
Photography by Lizzie Woolford
www.myspace.com/noahandthewhale
