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If the equipment was looking a little the-worse-for-wear after a whopping bout of touring which has included 84 dates this year (that's one every 4.345 days, numbers to three decimal places fans!) so were the band members, with vocalist and keyboards maestro Yuki Chikudate saying "I can't take this fucking shit." Unfortunately the passion of this outburst didn't extend into the gig itself, which continued after a couple of minutes of medium level shouts for acoustic numbers.
It was almost as if all the passion of this band has been sucked, by what can only be imagined as a rock and roll wormhole, out of the New Yorkers and into London upstarts Scanners, the support for the evening. At times lead singer Sarah threw herself around the stage with such energy that it was surprising she had the breath to throw out searingly intense lyrical explosions. Channelling early PJ Harvey and the out-and-out emotive guitar spirit of Kings of Leon, they really were mindblowing and it is to my absolute shame that I made the decision to finish my drink in a pre-gig pub and only caught the last couple of songs. A source as reliable as Dominic Grammatics however, described them as the best new band he'd seen in ages, so please take his word for it.
After this, a tired Asobi Seksu were like a lumbering Goliath felled by a tight riff from Scanners' David's guitar-sling. This wasn't helped by the fact that one of the great qualities of their recorded output, a hugely epic song carrying the kind of bombast that most bands take an entire LP to reach popping up mid-album, wasn't carried over into their live show. A sound mix that turned the epic sweep of guitars, cymbals and high vocals of tunes like 'New Years' into a mess of treble, incomprehensible noise and out of tune bass didn't help, and neither did out of tune vocals. James said that the end of this tour, Koko's in London last week, wouldn't be a big party as "we've had enough blowouts" and he was "going to spend five days in Portugal to have a vacation." This seems like it might be completely necessary, and will hopefully have a rejuvenating effect on a band who, despite being invigorating on record, were lacklustre at this Leeds date.
You can hear The Yorker's interview with Asobi Seksu frontman James Hanna on this week's Artscast.
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