The Pains of Being Pure at Heart gig at Scala review - Live music reviews

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart live at Scala

I’ve never been to Scala before, and to be honest I wasn’t massively impressed. I wasn’t really in the best frame of mind for a weak gig, kind of walking through the crowd like a ghost. The whole place had a kind of distant feel to it last night. The support band to The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - an uninspiring, shouty band called Male Bonding - sounded crap and I can’t be sure if that was because they were crap or if it was to do with the crappy sound setup. My guess is that it was a little from column A and a little from column B. Whatever the case, they definitely didn’t connect with the crowd, or me, in any real way.

After a long pause, POBPAH sort of slunk on stage as if they were testing the instruments for the real band, but of course they weren’t. With the bad sounds and the seeming disinterest on their part, they looked more like ghosts than I felt. It was the last night of their tour over here, and it seemed like they were definitely ready for home. In amongst the songs, they stopped for extended guitar tune-up moments, in which they mumble incoherently to us like they were talking to us from far away.

Their songs were a blur, almost indistinguishable from each other, far too alike for a bad sound setup and a disinterested performance. Their singles “Young Adult Fiction” and “Everything With You” are the only stand out pseudo-stompers, but sadly the rest were muted. “Come Saturday” was probably the low point. The crowd had come with their oo-ooooh-oohs ready and the POBPAH didn’t really step things up enough to really grab them.

A few “wooo”s (mainly from blokes, bizarrely) later, and they trot off stage only to reappear after a short, lacklustre appeal for more. I don’t doubt that the audience of POBPAH fans had a good night, but if they are going to win more people over then they need to be a bit more into it. They seem to have forgotten that they’re living the dream.

2.5/5

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