Lightspeed Champion @ Birmingham Academy 2 – 1st May 2008
The first band onstage tonight were Ox.Eagle.Lion.Man. The band at first looked rather unsteady, vocalist, Frederick tapping his microphone like a curious uninitiated performer. After the first song however, the band soon warmed up. Frederick has a voice which is rather loud and very deep, (if you imagine the deep tone and bass pitch of Tom from Editors you wouldn’t be far off.)
The sound of the band was fairly sparse sounding with just guitar, bass, drums and vocals. At first it seemed as if their songs were written around an agricultural concept, with references to horses and the like. The first song ended in a chorus with the singer chanting on about fatherhood;
“You steal my seed and make it grow.”
(To be brutally honest and to avoid having one’s metaphorical seed stolen a metaphorical barrier is advisable)
The performance style of the group also reminded me of the footage of those huge American gatherings in the Bible Belt where churches and halls full of people are preached to with a microphone and multiple hand guestures. This seemed to not quite work at points and I was reminded of Michael Barrymore on Big Brother doing his Hitler impression and no one understanding what it was about (and no one as of yet does…)
However, with a little less reverb on Frederick’s voice and perhaps the addition of another instrument to shake things up a bit, Ox.Eagle.Lion.Man could create something quite catchy, for example, at the end of their set Dev of Lightspeed Champion popped on stage and added some extra guitar bringing the set to a much more promising end to the way it began.
Second support act Operator Please were rather more well known by the audience and therefore given a warm welcome. They had a brilliant supply of energy and the crowd clapped away to a memorable hammond style organ solo. Violinist, Taylor added to the rocky outfit perfectly, providing fast paced riffs that kept everything moving along rather nicely.
After checking out the band online when I returned home I was shocked to discover how young they all are. They are all Australian and all rather young, at least two of the members being just 17 years old. Fairly intimidating when you consider how seriously good they are.
Lightspeed Champion finally came onstage to raptuous applause. The young crowd sang jubiliantly along to the first few lines of the opening number and the sound was well crafted. The violin sounding particularly bright and clear. After this song ended Dev immediately threw his hands up and said ‘Whoo’, much to the delight of his followers. There was often chat between Dev and the audience and many shouted out random things. Some shouted out songs and Dev replied “Thats not how it works!!!” He was a friendly and quite polite frontman, eager to please and good to watch (when I managed to get a glimpse of him, the mostly teenage audience being eerily tall.) A lot of the songs, being quite acoustic in nature had a comfortable, lulling effect to them and I began to imagine how well suited the band would be to playing a more initimate venue such as the Glee Club (especially when seated.) They certainly don’t play music for dancing to, more music to sit back and appreciate or have in the background.
The encore (or so I thought) consisted of a distortion rich version Star Wars (quite guitar hero like!) which went into another song. I truly believed that this was the end and went to leave but held back when the band returned to the stage for what literally must have been a 15 minute long finale. This truly made me long for a seat (I had, by this point, been at the venue for nearly 4 hours.) I guess it was just Dev’s way of helping the crowd get their money’s worth and surely if we weren’t enjoying ourselves we would’ve left, right?
Review – Frankie Ward
Photos – Matt Wilding