April 3rd, 2009 8:15am
White Lies, Friendly Fires, The Soft Pack at Lee’s Palace in Toronto
Frank YangEven without the “NME Presents” endorsement attached to the tour, I suspect the White Lies/Friendly Fires/Soft Pack show at Toronto's Lee’s Palace on Tuesday would have been a sell-out. All three acts came with their own built-in buzz, so in fact the venerable British publication may have been counting themselves lucky to be associated with the tour rather than the other way around.
Sole non-Brits on the bill, The Soft Pack - formerly known as The Muslims - were tasked with kicking things off. They certainly had a good sound - the ingredients of their surf-garage pop aesthetic sufficiently familiar but their particular recipe still reasonably fresh - but none of the songs particularly jumped out as being remarkable and their performance was pretty staid.
But most things would probably come across staid when held up against middle act, St Alban’s Friendly Fires. I wasn’t especially won over by their self-titled debut but I now realize that sitting and listening to it in the comfort of home is really the wrong environment for it. The proper setting is in a club, in front of the stage, as their dual drummer/percussionists make a glorious, rhythmic racket, the guitarist freaks and flails and singer/keyboardist Ed Macfarlane dances and shakes his hips non-stop despite the fact that, let’s be honest, he really doesn’t have any.
Now, as I intimated in my review of White Lies' UK chart-topping debut To Lose My Life, they require a certain amount of buy-in on the part of the listener. Kind of like how horror films require you to suspend disbelief, to accept that monsters exist and that their potential victims really are that stupid, White Lies need you to believe their angst is real, and that there’s genuine weight behind their vague pronouncements of profundity. Manage that, and for the most part I have, and they’re reasonably enjoyable. Behind the stark lighting, all-black outfits and Harry McVeigh’s dramatic baritone - decidedly scratchy-sounding by this point in the tour - are some truly catchy pop songs that will have you singing along, even if you feel kind of guilty about it.
Photos: White Lies, Friendly Fires, The Soft Pack @ Lee’s Palace - March 31, 2009
MP3: White Lies - “Death”
MP3: Friendly Fires - “Jump In The Pool”
MP3: The Soft Pack - “Nightlife”
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MP3: The Dukes Of Stratosphear - “My Love Explode”
MP3: The Dukes Of Stratosphear - “Braniac’s Daughter”
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