Sarah Nixey
Blindness
Audiovisuals
The Lexington, London
Tuesday November 1 2011
They're fresh-faced and youthful, but also oddly middle-aged in their dutiful conformity, as if they've spent many hours studying the art of anthemic AOR.
Who? Ladies and gents, the Audiovisuals - a band who (I note from their Facebook page) quote Bruce Springsteen as an influence. Well, that figures. Their sound is big and grand and incredibly bland. They'll probably be huge.
If there's any justice, of course, it'll be Blindness who become huge. Tonight they're certainly burning from the inside with their own strange fire, and if it's anthems you want, they've got plenty. Frazzled, fractured anthems, with all the nerve endings exposed.
The trademark Blindness combination of machine-beats and organic drum rhythms mesh and lock, the guitar skids and swerves all over the place like a drunken driver in a supermarket car park, the bass grumbles and thunders as if Jean-Jaques Burnel and Jah Wobble had both been employed as consultants. And, fronting this fearsome noise, vocalist Beth Rettig is half way between assertive and agonised, throwing her bizarre repertoire of martial arts shapes until she ends up lying on the stage, feet up on the kick drum. Well, Bruce Springsteen never did it that way, that's for sure. Perhaps he should've done.
Last time I saw Sarah Nixey, it was 2007 and she'd just released her debut solo album, after her previous band, Black Box Recorder, had broken up. Now she's just released her second solo album - after Black Box Recorder broke up for the second time. Is it me, or is there a pattern emerging here?
Either way, Sarah Nixey has moved on, musically, from her earlier solo incarnation. Back then, she was an electro-diva fronting a couple of guys with synths. Now, she's a supercool supper club chanteuse, backed by a combo comprising drums, bass, acoustic guitar, keyboards and cello. This isn't really an unexpected transformation: I recall I mentioned, back in 2007, that her cover of The Human League's electropop novelty song 'The Black Hit Of Space' sounded rather incongruous amid her own songs, which even then were progressing in a more urbane and mannerly direction.
Well, we're now four years further down the road, and Sarah Nixey's reinvention as a kind of restrained, English rose version of Anna Calvi is complete. Tonight she's all elegant sophistication, courteous and austere, leading her band though a low-key set of mostly new material in which a jazzy troubadour aesthetic is much to the fore, and electropop novelty songs are conspicuous by their absence.
It all has a certain unostentatious charm - but the show never quite gets going. Notwithstanding Sarah Nixey's own politely humourous asides between the songs, the performance is sober and controlled to the point of being ever so slightly underwhelming.
Perhaps here, in one of London's scruffy indie-rock watering holes, immediately after the full-on sturm and drang of Blindness, just isn't the right place for Sarah Nixey now. Back in 2007 I speculated that her natural home might end up being Ronnie Scott's jazz club in Soho. I'm sure of it now.
Sarah Nixey: Website | MySpace | Facebook
Audiovisuals: Website | MySpace | Facebook
For more photos from this gig, find Blindness by name here.
