Deerhoof + Florence & The Machine at Hyde Park
The second part of my reviews of the Blur support acts from last week, following Vampire Weekend and Amadou & Mariam yesterday.
The first support act of the day was American indie group Deerhoof and I imagine everyone was surprised to see the band play a stage like this. Even the band themselves were probably surprised to find themselves playing a stage that is probably five times in size what they’d normally play. As such, I think they played a set that was admired in the sense that they kept their focus in front of a sizeable crowd but nothing invigorating. You could tell that they feel more comfortable playing to 500 people and they might be more enjoyable in that kind of venue but not here.
And so the hype machine brings us Florence & The Machine, the third of a triplet of female solo artists (the others are Little Boots and La Roux) to be hyped to the point of no return. On the plus side, she had an amazingly booming voice that was very impressive and pleasing to my ears and she was incredibly energetic and knows how you should work up a crowd, though you didn’t need to do much to the girl in front of me who went apeshit for every song and bounced up and down for every song and clapped out of time for every song. On the downside, her set in terms of music felt amazingly samey apart from maybe Kiss With A Fist. I’m pretty sure after seeing her that an album of her material (which was just released last Monday in the form of Lungs) would, at this moment, be tedious.
Pictures from the Deerhoof set can be found on Flickr.
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Posted on July 10th, 2009 by Max
Filed under: Gigs, Reviews
[...] not to say she is a terrible singer – she has proved to me last year at Hyde Park and at Patrick Wolf’s Palladium extravangaza that she can sing – but her songs lack the [...]