Pale Blue Eyes @ Islington Assembly Hall, London (Live Review)
- Published in Live
Pale Blue Eyes
Islington Assembly Hall
Words & Pics by Captain Stavros
There’s a certain charm to bands who look like they’ve just walked out of a staff meeting and straight onto a stage. For British Birds, tonight’s openers at Islington Assembly Hall, that charm came with the faint aroma of dry erase markers and crushed dreams. Like a group of sixth form teachers living out their midlife fantasy, they launched into their set with the tightly drilled enthusiasm of Battle of the Bands finalists who've done their homework. Maybe too much of it.
Any attempt at earnest self-promotion, “We’ve got a new album out”, was met with a thunderous “Fuck off” from somewhere deep in the crowd. Undeterred, British Birds soldiered on, their drummer miming the lyrics with the exaggerated glee of a pantomime villain. It's hard not to admire their gusto, even if the vibe veered uncomfortably close to the PTA Talent Show.
By the time Pale Blue Eyes took the stage, the room was still politely half-empty. The balcony, untouched. The air heavy with anticipation or, perhaps, just a lack of fresh oxygen. Their opener, ‘TV Flicker’, drifted in with the ease of background music in a dentist’s waiting room; relaxed, inoffensive, and oddly numbing.
Large industrial fans were positioned dramatically onstage, presumably to whip up that music video aesthetic; hair tousled just so. But instead of cinematic flair, we got the frontman’s locks lifting unnaturally skyward like startled pigeon wings, creating a visual dissonance somewhere between spooky and slapstick.
A drummer who bore an uncanny resemblance to Noel Fielding offered the evening’s most visually compelling element, but the rest of the band felt like living rations; pale, portable blood banks with synths. The songs, while pleasant enough, bled into one another like watercolour on wet paper. What might have once been a cohesive sonic identity, now felt like a diluted formula, repeated until the flavour ran out.
They closed with ‘Chelsea’, a track that promised something cinematic but barely rose above the level of a grey Sunday. It wasn’t bad, exactly, but it wasn’t much of anything.
Verdict: British Birds flapped and squawked with gusto; Pale Blue Eyes drifted by like clouds on Prozac.
