Live music listings: February 2007Roll the mouse over the dates on the calendar below to see who's playing, then click on the date for the full listing and ticket info.Click on the mailing list link to your left there and enter your email address and we'll let you know, at the start of every week, who's playing in the next seven days and for how much, and leave you to peruse the full listings here at your liberty and leisure.
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Wed 7th The Luminaire presents HAL + Gavin Thorpe
Doors 7.30 HAL are a hymn to blissful isolation, their eponymous debut album both populist and arcane, modern yet infused with an old school quality. This much you will know if you heard their first single, ‘Worry About The Wind', a tribute to The Band's Rick Danko, which – not unlike the aforementioned ‘70s folk-rock gods – married the kind of harmonies that never go out of fashion to a sylvan verve and otherworldly sensibility. Except The Band, or indeed any other outfit, weren't endowed with vocals as breathtaking as Dave Allen, whose falsetto-voiced delivery adds to HAL's songs a saintly lustre and evokes the days when rock was blessed with a sun-kissed innocence. It's this respectable distance from the conveyor belt pop culture that makes ‘HAL' such a sublime, inimitable album. That and their glut of delicate, potent melodies. Shot through with a young man's preoccupation with love in al it's myriad incarnations, ‘HAL' belies their tender years with eleven supremely crafted songs. ‘What A Lovely Dance' is a poignant, multi layered ballad shot through with a heady brew of longing and despair, while ‘Play The Hits' is a joyful jolt of new wave euphoria, like Steely Dan racing Saint Etienne down Route 66. Indeed from the optimistic mantra of ‘Keep Love As Your Golden Rule' – surely the best song Neil Young never wrote – to ‘My Eyes Are Sore'. ‘HAL' is, for all it's accessibility, awash with the kind of esoteric touches that separate the exceptional from the everyday. It's Van Morrison in his blue eyed soulful heyday, it's Brian Wilson jumping out of the sandbox. It's both a perfect piece of pop joy and an aching heartbreaker of an album.
Tonight, HAL will unveil what comes next... |
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