When The Fool Becomes A King
The Polyphonic Spree, Birmingham Carling Academy, November 2nd 2004.
'Hi, my name's Tim DeLaughter from The Polyphonic Spree' (and it's true, we didn't recognise him with his civvy clothes on) '...and I'd like to introduce you to a band we've brought over from Texas called Mandarin'. The support band maybe needed an introduction as they seem an unassuming bunch, the lead singer having the apparent countenance of the guy who drinks down your local who only ever speaks to you to tell you where you've just gone wrong on the fruit machine. Mandarin ain't pipsqueaks, though: they make a big enough sound in what I could only describe as tuneful shoegazing, Mercury Rev being the nearest comparison to the total effect. They have a handful of more than decent songs, but the complete deficit of charisma means the sound of crowd chatter nearly drowns out the last couple of tunes (and this was close to the stage). Now you can accuse The Polyphonic Spree of a lot of things, such as plagiarising The Flaming Lips and spouting hippy-dippy bollocks, but lack of charisma will never be their kryptonite: when it comes to grinning, DeLaughter never stops. Second album 'Together We're Heavy' contains some pretty strong material, but it's the visual spectacle of their live show which places them into the sphere of the indispensible.
Stage limitations mean the eight backing singers are cramped into such a small area that the health and safety inspector part of my brain is concerned that if one of the back row loses their footing during all that jumping up and down they could all go down like dominoes and we'll have a mini-Heysel on our hands. And I never realised there were so many babes in the band, or is it that with diminishing record sales, their tunics just fit more snugly these days? And democracy or not, DeLaughter has enough smarts about him to make sure the foxiest of the backing singers are at the front: the hot eurasian-looking one in the orange (we don't realise just how hot until she has to keep wiping the sweat off her brow with her robe sleeve) and the one in the red who can really move. But then, from what we've learned about hippies from history, DeLaughter possibly pays them minimum wage, treats them as sex slaves and pacifies them with valium gas between performances.
The Spree start the show with a grandstanding version of the second album's opening track (A Long Days Continued/We Sound Amazed) and the set is quite heavily loaded with tracks from 'Together We're Heavy' an album they're justifiably proud of. It doesn't really matter how familiar you are with the material, though, as by the 39th repeat of each chorus you'll feel you know each song better than your own mother. No brownie points for subtlety, then, but the showmanship and sunniness makes it a pretty effective show, the energy coming from twenty-odd freaks coming on like The Brady Bunch fried on acid whipping the crowd into a heightened state of arousal. There's not too many shows where you can say you've seen the drummer prancing around on the speaker stands, after all.
For the climax, they all hold hands and skip around the balcony, before circling around the crowd and work their way through the audience back on stage to deliver 'Soldier Girl' for the encore. The show comes in at just under two hours long so full marks on the value-for-money front, and it's happy (clappy) meals all round in McDonalds across the road, the branch presumably not having seen so many robes on their premises since they last had to dish out Jedi figurines as tie-in merchandise. 'I've got the sunshine in me' beams a wasted hippychick at New Street cafe, (although from where I was standing it looked more like a chocolate brownie) and as I wind my weary way back home from Telford Central to a soundtrack of lively birdsong it's tempting to conjecture about the dawning of a new era.
The comedown though is inevitably terrible in the morning, with the news of West Ham's pathetic capitulation at Cardiff and Ohio delivering a second term for Bush in the US Election. Just another timely reminder that you can never ever trust hippies with messianic leanings telling you everything's going to be OK.
The Polyphonic Spree, Birmingham Carling Academy, November 2nd 2004.
'Hi, my name's Tim DeLaughter from The Polyphonic Spree' (and it's true, we didn't recognise him with his civvy clothes on) '...and I'd like to introduce you to a band we've brought over from Texas called Mandarin'. The support band maybe needed an introduction as they seem an unassuming bunch, the lead singer having the apparent countenance of the guy who drinks down your local who only ever speaks to you to tell you where you've just gone wrong on the fruit machine. Mandarin ain't pipsqueaks, though: they make a big enough sound in what I could only describe as tuneful shoegazing, Mercury Rev being the nearest comparison to the total effect. They have a handful of more than decent songs, but the complete deficit of charisma means the sound of crowd chatter nearly drowns out the last couple of tunes (and this was close to the stage). Now you can accuse The Polyphonic Spree of a lot of things, such as plagiarising The Flaming Lips and spouting hippy-dippy bollocks, but lack of charisma will never be their kryptonite: when it comes to grinning, DeLaughter never stops. Second album 'Together We're Heavy' contains some pretty strong material, but it's the visual spectacle of their live show which places them into the sphere of the indispensible.
Stage limitations mean the eight backing singers are cramped into such a small area that the health and safety inspector part of my brain is concerned that if one of the back row loses their footing during all that jumping up and down they could all go down like dominoes and we'll have a mini-Heysel on our hands. And I never realised there were so many babes in the band, or is it that with diminishing record sales, their tunics just fit more snugly these days? And democracy or not, DeLaughter has enough smarts about him to make sure the foxiest of the backing singers are at the front: the hot eurasian-looking one in the orange (we don't realise just how hot until she has to keep wiping the sweat off her brow with her robe sleeve) and the one in the red who can really move. But then, from what we've learned about hippies from history, DeLaughter possibly pays them minimum wage, treats them as sex slaves and pacifies them with valium gas between performances.
The Spree start the show with a grandstanding version of the second album's opening track (A Long Days Continued/We Sound Amazed) and the set is quite heavily loaded with tracks from 'Together We're Heavy' an album they're justifiably proud of. It doesn't really matter how familiar you are with the material, though, as by the 39th repeat of each chorus you'll feel you know each song better than your own mother. No brownie points for subtlety, then, but the showmanship and sunniness makes it a pretty effective show, the energy coming from twenty-odd freaks coming on like The Brady Bunch fried on acid whipping the crowd into a heightened state of arousal. There's not too many shows where you can say you've seen the drummer prancing around on the speaker stands, after all.
For the climax, they all hold hands and skip around the balcony, before circling around the crowd and work their way through the audience back on stage to deliver 'Soldier Girl' for the encore. The show comes in at just under two hours long so full marks on the value-for-money front, and it's happy (clappy) meals all round in McDonalds across the road, the branch presumably not having seen so many robes on their premises since they last had to dish out Jedi figurines as tie-in merchandise. 'I've got the sunshine in me' beams a wasted hippychick at New Street cafe, (although from where I was standing it looked more like a chocolate brownie) and as I wind my weary way back home from Telford Central to a soundtrack of lively birdsong it's tempting to conjecture about the dawning of a new era.
The comedown though is inevitably terrible in the morning, with the news of West Ham's pathetic capitulation at Cardiff and Ohio delivering a second term for Bush in the US Election. Just another timely reminder that you can never ever trust hippies with messianic leanings telling you everything's going to be OK.
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