Neon Indian - The Cooler, Bristol - 19th November 2011 (Live Review)
Thursday, 24 November 2011
Written by Ellen Davies
The Cooler is a venue that can quite often be found a quarter full with uncomfortable teenagers, despite the fact that it often puts on really great bands you’d imagine hordes of people would be travelling from all over to see. After arriving early for Neon Indian, seeing that regular scene and gliding towards the stage, it was a pleasant surprise to find myself in a completely packed room by the time the band walked on.
With a lot of line-up changes over the last year resulting in a larger band, and the new album, it was hard to know how much of a difference in sound should be expected since the days of Psychic Chasms. But it only took the opening, a big, powerful analogue synth build up full of glitchy bursts and feedback, to know that Neon Indian were going to play in the same kind of particular way whatever album they were up to.
And they do it so well. It’s not that they haven’t moved and developed impressively, more that they have such a specific style it would be hard for that to not be really overt live. With quite a spectacular amount of equipment including some really enviable analogue synths, and an exciting sound, Neon Indian are a band that could not fail to give off a brilliantly summery aura whether they’re their audience’s favourite thing or not, and in this case they really were.
Palomo thrusted his way around the stage in a way the word ‘arrogant ‘doesn’t do justice to. I remember seeing this kind of behaviour from him before and finding it vaguely endearing, and it’s hard not to. But keeping more of a tight watch on his actual contribution to their live sound this time, disappointingly only added to my suspicions that, from what I’ve seen of Neon Indian, Palomo seems only to quite whole-heartedly sing into a really notably quiet microphone, occasionally throwing in a bit of fairly non-consequential keyboard in a way equivalent to picking up a maraca. Obviously, a huge amount of credit has to be given to the man who's brainchild Neon Indian always has been, and it seems like a crime to write about him that way, but live, it’s almost as though he gets a little left behind with all of that whilst the rest of the band hold the music together.
With a set of about half old album/half new album material, and one that seamlessly switched between songs filled with delicate yet dense layers of synth and kaleidoscope-esque programmed keyboard, and those slightly cleaner and more guitar based, Neon Indian are one of the most evocative, pleasant live bands I can think of. By the end of the night, it could really be felt that the whole audience was feeling warm and Korg-like, venturing outdoors at the end of the night into the awful weather couldn’t have been more of an unwanted reality-shock.
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