It's a warm Friday night and anyone who has been locked in hibernation
from dreary skies, gloomy headlines and relentless G20 hype is out and about
enjoying a tangerine sunset in London.
Cargo's Free Fridays night of DJs and live music in an east London
club-meets-gastro setting has proven a good draw, and proved to be again tonight.
But it's perhaps an odd place for Axel Willner to
showcase The Field's forthcoming album, Yesterday And Today.
The atmosphere is all drinks, meets, parties and a big Friday night
out - not what you'd associate with the more experimental, ambient furrow
Willner plots.
This manifested as soon as the band - Willner has accomplices these days - came on, ramming one of the new
songs, Leave It, straight down our necks milliseconds after the Allez Allez
DJs stopped. It sounded initially like a sound check, but its skippy,
choppy loops skittered along for close to 10 minutes, sounding far less
welcoming than on the new recording.
This confused the crowd, whose initial bobs of euphoria to the tune of a
beat gradually subsided into a sway of uncertainty. The Little Heart Beats
So Fast picked things up with its rising throbby beats and vocal samples,
but the set flatlined after that.
Willner's plaintive expression gave little impetus either. He rarely
glanced up from his mixer, save to suck down bottles of lager. As the set
wore on the crowd got drunker and rowdier.
The live instruments were erratically turned up, in contrast to the
mixer and synths, fragmenting the impeccable harmony of The Field's sound.
Even their best ear bending moments from From Here We Go Sublime, like Everyday and Over The Ice, sounded
decidedly average.
None of this should dissuade fans from the promise of the forthcoming album
(which we've heard snippets of) - little of it was aired.
Tonight simply seemed to be a case of wrong venue, wrong crowd and wrong night.
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