LIVE: Maccabees @ Rock City [08/3/2012]

Mark Linsdell – Platform

The year of 2007 will always be remembered as a year when young British indie bands dominated the music scene. Many of these have fallen by the waste side: The Automatic, The Wombats, The Kooks, to name but a few. These bands ultimately failed because they never matured their sound, preferring to stay in the warm comfort of their teeny bopper tunes. One of the bands who’ve come out of the other side are Brighton 6 piece The Maccabees. After releasing critically acclaimed third album ‘Given to The Wild’ at the beginning of 2012, the Maccabees are back on tour to show their fans (and those bands) the formula for staying power.

The Maccabees strolled on to the Rock City stage  to the cinematic opener ‘Given to the wild’ which blended perfectly into ‘Child’, the beautiful, fragile melody and moody blue lighting loosens the sold out crowd into a gormless, charmed sway. Sticking to material off the new album for the first half an hour or so, the band have never sounded tighter. The harmonies between the three guitarists, the added samples, the thumping drums and Orlando’s voice all compliment each other perfectly on ‘Feel to Follow’ and ‘Ayla’.

A fan favourite off the second album, ‘No Kind Words’ sounded darker than ever before and drew an almost animalistic response from the enthusiastic audience, however, that’s nothing compared to what happened when the band travelled back to 2007 with ‘First Love’ and ‘X-ray’. Beer was flying and bodies flailed with desperate chants of “X-Ray, X-Ray, X-Ray” belted out which lead to guitarist Hugo to confess that “Rock city is one of my top 5 venues in the world”.

Pre-encore, The Maccabees stormed through latest single ‘Pelican’ and went off to a rapture of noise. The crowd hoped they would return with an arsenal of early classics. It was not to be. They decided to sandwich just the one early bopper ‘Precious Time’ inbetween new songs ‘Unknown’ and the highlight of the night, album and set closer, ‘Grew Up at Midnight’, a song that could fill the Capital FM arena 3 times over.

Much to the distain of certain audience members, this is what the Maccabees are developing into; One of the few current British bands that could fill an arena.  However, without wanting them to turn into a band like The View, their still young audience would have definitely liked some more time travel.

Platform Rating

8/10

Tags: concert, gig, maccabees, nottingham, review, rock city, show, the maccabees