Deptford Goth
Leaf Teashop (Liverpool)
19th October
‘Somber’ and ‘haunting’ are terms that
surround Deptford Goth and the kind of delicate synth pop that the Londoner
brings to LEAF Tea shop tonight. Since James Blake crooned his way into
mainstream consciousness with his Mercury nominated debut, melancholy has
always sat awkwardly amongst critical and commercial perception, swinging like
a pendulum between derision and acclaim as artists fall on the right, or indeed
wrong side of ethereal or dreary.
Life
After Defo, Daniel Woodhouse’s tentatively
acclaimed debut album, for all its warmth and heart, stayed indirect and
ambiguous lyrically, instead using indistinct emotions and sentiments as a way
of creating an sweeping, and at times very moving sense of uncertainty. The
danger of this form of songwriting of course, is that it very much relies on
the listener’s own sense of empathy and imagination, translating into
insincerity, even laziness for those not looking to put the work in. Now some
of the best songs of all time are built around ambiguity and being open
interpretation. I mean just look at Motown
in the sixties, Pop Music in the eighties and even more recently; Matt
Berninger’s The National. Creating
music that provokes emotion on a more expressive level relies almost entirely
on the delivery. This is where much of Life
After Defo as a record succeeds, as alluring synths and frostbitten chords
coax these songs into a state of emotiveness beyond what Woodhouse is capable
of achieving lyrically. It is fitting then, that this is where this evening’s
performance all falls down.
Accompanied only by a Cellist, Woodhouse
stumbles into Defo’s title track like
a center back at a penalty shootout. Those little modified instrumental nuances
that brightened the album, whimper hesitantly as a vocal line is mumbled to the
point of where it could just be a continuous hum and no one would notice the
difference. I’m being unfair, but it shouldn’t detract from the baffling
indifference just dripping from every song that is rattled through. Feel Real is the Londoner’s only track
that even comes close to danceable, so it is no coincidence that it represents
the closest associations with pop music. That punchy, deliberate beat that
anchors the song is reduced to a muffled footstep, and with it the blood and
soul that kept it alive. Woodhouse and his Cellist eventually wake up during a
wilted rendition of Years, but only
to complain about the excessive chatter going on among the more unsympathetic
members of the audience. I mean, even in a venue as open as Leaf, a talkative
crowd has more of a reflection of the performance than the manners of those
witnessing it.
Bloody
Lip is one of the finest album closers this year,
offering a startling and very poignant moment of self-reflection, leaving the
listener with the sense that despite all the uncertainty, despite all the
doubt, this is a man who has found some peace in all the darkness. That
gorgeous refrain of ‘There has never been / And there will never be” is
disarmingly vulnerable, almost like Woodhouse is on the verge of disclosing a
secret but keeps changing his mind. Sung with such an alarming detachment this
evening though, it’s almost as if he just can’t be bothered to tell us. A great
show is meant to make you reassess an album, keeping it on repeat for the days
that follow as the songs take on new forms and sizes. Throughout every song
this evening though, I strain to try and mold the sounds emerging from the
stage into the shapes I’m used to hearing on the record.
I love the album, so I take absolutely no
pleasure in writing any of this. And of course, a record so rich sonically is
always going to be difficult to perform live, especially without any sort of
substantial tour budget. But with a sound built around such indirect, even
apathetic lyrics, it’s the textures, the instrumental flourishes, the shifts in
tone and dynamics that are relied upon to engage the listener. This evening is
evidence that Woodhouse is the only one who doesn’t understand this. More
worryingly though, it suggests that he isn’t being enigmatic or aloof, he just might
not have anything to say.
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