Delays perform with promise
Delays/Paula Kelley/Cardia
T.T. the Bear's, Cambridge, Massachusetts
July 14, 2004
by Marc Hirsh
[photo taken by Marc Hirsh]
originally published in The Boston Globe, July 17, 2004
Delays aren’t a band without flaws, but based on the evidence at
T.T.
the Bear’s on Wednesday night, live performance isn’t one of them.
Playing
their first-ever American show, the UK band was sharp but not
excessively
polished during their 45-minute set, demonstrating a willingness to
goof
off (as when frontman Greg Gilbert publicly thanked the local optician
who
fixed his contact lens problem earlier in the day) while refusing to
let
their songs spin away from them.
The British music press has been throwing around names like the La’s
and
the Cocteau Twins in its quest for suitable comparisons to Delays’
strong
grasp of pop hooks and their airy sound, but here in Boston, there were
times
when they sounded like nobody so much as the Sheila Divine. Right now,
though,
they’re better at coming up with hooks than fully developed songs, and
the
band’s strongest asset is Gilbert’s impressively powerful falsetto,
which
most of their material (like the shimmering “Hey Girl”) took great care
to
showcase.
Delays are a young band, however, with only the recently released Faded
Seaside Glamour (Rough Trade Records) under their belts at this
point,
and their onstage energy made up for hit-or-miss material. Even with
the
samples activated by keyboardist Aaron Gilbert to fill in the sonic
gaps
in songs like “Stay Where You Are,” with its twisty, repeated synth
bass,
the instrumental limitations of live performance made the songs cleaner
and
more direct than on the somewhat overproduced album. A few songs,
including
the new “Lost In A Melody” (which is slated to be Delays’ next British
single),
found the band locked together to create a hard-charging rhythmic pulse
barely
acknowledged on Faded Seaside Glamour. Too often, though, they
were
forced to end just as their momentum was starting to build.
Openers Cardia, from New York City, tried to use their reverbed guitars
and
busy drums to reach for a similar dramatic sweep but seemed stymied by
an
overpowering mix and indifferent material. Paula Kelley provided a nice
counterpoint
to both of the other acts on the bill, sitting at a keyboard and
playing
nicely stripped-down versions of songs from last year’s The Trouble
With
Success or How You Fit Into The World (Kimchee Records) with light
backing
from guitarist Aaron Tap and violinist Angie Shyr (“3/7 of the Paula
Kelley
Orchestra,” as she helpfully pointed out).