Calvin Halliday’s review on this site of The New Mendicants’ recently-released debut album Into the Lime is a great primer for this evening’s gig – as he puts it: “It’s doubtful that anybody familiar with either party’s previous endeavours would have been awaiting an album of abstract noise or experimental ghetto house.”
He’s not wrong – although this live show was a little underwhelming, even with the expectation of this kind of gentility. Spotlit in one of the Arches intimately cavernous vaults the two men sat before a crowd which seemed for most of the evening to be only barely engaged. In the space around the transept a number of people milled around; reading posters, chatting during songs. Not a straight-edge purist for gig aesthetics anyway, it wasn’t particularly annoying-more just a surprise to see this at an acoustic show.
Normally this kind of aimless disinterest might lead to calls for a return to the good old days of public execution, but tonight it seems like just another dairy cow set against insipid, rolling scenery.
It’s what a lot of the night was-unremarkable moments of surprise. Lyrically the New Mendicants aren’t breaking any new ground, and when heard together it sounds like an earnest attempt to cover every country/acoustic song’s subject matter in a little over an hour. There’s ‘The Loving Kind’, about a guy who can’t commit to a woman because of his difficulties living up to the eponymous stereotype. It’s hard to tell who it’d be for: the Mumford and Sons-loving moron who lost his mascara and Placebo albums under mysterious circumstances during Freshers’ Week would find it too shallow even to find some way to identify with, and the man whose commitment issues run deep would wonder what kind of Mumford and Sons-loving moron would be taken in by something so facile.
Lots of the songs are like this: cliché. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – not every song needs to be an emotional Hindenburg, but to be honest there’s not much musically to keep our interest and the patter -while nice and unpretentious – isn’t really grabbing anyone either. It’s an evening without any real hold.
Normally this would be infuriating. Either because we would be left feeling like music, as a whole, has been denigrated by such banality or because we’d catch ourselves falling to its soporific lull and feel outraged at the prospect of having been duped. There’s none of that here-it’s just… pleasant; unchallenging, uncomplicated, unreal. It isn’t possible to endorse or trash an evening like that in itself, and it’d be desperate to try, even if the lack of desperation means you listen to Rage Against the Machine on the way home to try and remember the feeling of fury.