After 18 months of confinement, London Grammar are right here to attract us additional inside. Arriving onstage to swelling strings and a taped speech about writing a brand new track that “actually expresses this sense of loneliness”, the London by way of Nottingham trio – maybe higher named Bristol Sonics – drift into the title observe from their third album, 2021’s Californian Soil. They rework the huge expanse of Alexandra Palace into a huge womb; all muted beats and throbs and blood-red visible shadow play. And thru this amniotic bubble floats singer Hannah Reid’s voice, as light but arresting as whale track to an unborn.
We’re not at Rammstein now, Toto. With Californian Soil marking the band’s second No 1 album, London Grammar have efficiently superior the minimalist electro-soul-noir formulation of The xx into fashionable clubland R&B territory, making for a really completely different, very immersive massive gig expertise.
Certainly, the primary half hour of the set appears designed as a dancefloor anthem elongated over seven or eight songs. For “Lacking”, “Hey Now” and “Speaking”, the background tones of Dan Rothman and Dominic Main stay unobtrusive, staying out of the way in which of Reid’s distinctive voice, a cumulonimbus with tonsils. She’s been in comparison with Florence Welch, however Reid doesn’t depend on over-egged vocal acrobatics to impress; unassumingly filling the room, her voice naturally rides the emotional undulations of her songs. It could generally blunt the sharper social feedback and extra determined passions at play – “I noticed the way in which you laughed behind her again if you f***ed another person,” Reid sings, like honey in your ears, throughout “Lord it’s a Feeling” – but it surely definitely makes for a gong tub of a gig. “How does it really feel now you’re alone?” she asks in “How Does it Really feel”, and it feels, if we’re sincere, like a ketamine rave in a Radox manufacturing unit.
Steadily, the beats rise till “I Want the Evening” kicks right into a tribal electroclash of noise, backed by silver shard visuals. By which period, London Grammar have positioned Ally Pally right into a sort of intimate altered state, all the higher to share their luxurious traumas. As her bandmates make like a waterlogged U2, Reid sits on the entrance of the stage to sing of emotional scars on “Huge Image”, whereas “America”, through which she watches a lover run off to chase their very own American dream, is delivered stark and acoustic, and all of the extra shifting for it.
You shake your head and it’s the encore, the place the stalking beats of “Bones of Ribbon” climb to a bombastic peak. The gang take over the singing on the band’s greatest hit, “Robust” (primarily Portishead gone R&B), earlier than Lose Your Head” transforms right into a full-on gothic rave, akin to a Halloween celebration at Pacha. You allow the present feeling haunted by a troubling dream, all of the whereas hoping it recurs.