It is very hard to disagree with 10,000 people. Specifically, the 10,000 people filling Alexandra Palace, many of whom may already have bought tickets for Alt-J’s next London date: 24 January 2015 at the O2 Arena (capacity: 20,000). They don’t look like the sorts of people you don’t normally mind aggressively dissenting with – rainforest loggers, say. They shuffle around enthusiastically to a brief hour of Alt-J’s mid-paced folktronica, clapping along crisply to Breezeblocks, Alt-J’s breakout single from their first album. It seems churlish to harsh their mellow.
We’re not even at an infamous gig, like those earlier this week by Lauryn Hill, where the artist gravely disappoints on multiple counts. Arrayed in a row, with touring bassist Cameron Knight replacing lost founder member Gwil Sainsbury, Alt-J deliver songs from their two records. Keyboard player Gus Unger-Hamilton and singing guitarist Joe Newman are perfectly affable in between tracks, grateful to be hosting their biggest gig ever. The word “performing” would be stretching matters here: there’s a light show; someone throws a T-shirt into the crowd; at they end, they make their little triangle symbol with their fingers.
How have Alt-J come to be plonked on such a big stage, playing the fussy anti-music that they do? Their second album, This Is All Yours, came out last Monday, and looks a strong contender for the No 1 chart spot today. It is slightly less replete with annoying flourishes than their debut, An Awesome Wave, which won the 2012 Mercury Music prize.
TIAY does, however, contain Left Hand Free, played early on tonight. The band ostensibly wrote it to appease their US label, who were after a single for the American market. “Ha,” they must have thought, “we’ll write a song that sounds like a bad copy of the Black Keys.” The label, of course, loved it and made a video for it, in which scantily clad young white people horse around in a river as though in a beer commercial.
In the comments section on YouTube, fans seem baffled and alarmed at this U-turn. Left Hand Free contains nothing of Alt-J’s clear USP, roughly – “bright young British things combine polyrhythms with textures, pastoral feints with atmospheric swerves, Fleet Foxes harmonies with mannered vocals”. Left Hand Free does, however, show that Alt-J are willing to suspend their previous modus operandi in order to sell records. Tonight it remains a sore thumb in their set, an attempt at loose blues-rock by a band who seem so uptight they probably iron their money.
In fairness, it’s difficult to judge any band in this draughty venue, where the sound bounces around, getting muddy with the dust of countless conventions of miniature-railway enthusiasts. But whatever allure Alt-J may have in headphones (and there is some) does not scale up well.
The chimes and thuds of Bloodflood, from the first album, sound like trip-hop played on a keyboard’s “Oriental” setting. A “little brass band” comes on for TIAY’s Bloodflood Pt II, whose soundbed consists of piano chords, drum machines, and Joe Newman trying to sing sexy. But you can’t actually hear the brass. “Assassin de la police,” Newman utters at one point in a cod-Jamaican sing-song, invoking rapper KRS-One’s exquisite diatribe against police racism, as misheard by the French. The song’s lyrics, when you check, appear to flip-flop between come hithers, and thoughts on gang culture in Newman’s native Southampton. None of these subtleties makes it through the murk.
Shesheshe from An Awesome Wave recalls a skipping CD of Simon and Garfunkel singing a madrigal, only not half as intriguing. Finally, TIAY’s The Gospel of John Hurt locates a groove that lasts more than 15 seconds; the bassist hits some electronic drum pads. Somehow, Gospel feels more satisfying than the more famous tracks that have gone before: the Miley Cyrus-sampling single, Hunger of the Pine, the Leon-referencing Matilda .
Criticising Alt-J is always a minefield. Kvetch about their lack of a show and you sound like a frump who has never had an out-of-body experience listening to a man play a laptop. Explain how singer Newman’s delivery and falsetto actually make you angry and you risk sounding like a philistine ill-acquainted with non-standard singing. Mannered vocals can be thrilling – David Bowie, Joanna Newsom, Thom Yorke, the list is long – but Newman’s are adenoidal and poseur-ish, lacking the delicious blurring of the feminine and the masculine, the ecstatic lack of oxygen that good male falsettos pack in. Pharrell: divine male falsetto, in which you almost forgive him for being the sleazebag who wrote Blurred Lines. Newman: guy singing in a funny voice.
Embark on a downer over their overcomplicated music and you risk sounding like a remedial verse-chorus-verse dullard, ill at ease in the 21st century’s interdisciplinary ADHD. Radiohead can do this tricksy stuff because of their philosophical certainty that the centre cannot hold (pace, Yeats). Radiohead’s quivering music illustrates the instability of everything we know. Alt-J’s music merely illustrates how clever they are at abruptly throwing another device into the kitchen sink.
■ Kitty Empire reviews Jamie T’s Carry on the Grudge
