Live Review
Zola Blood
The Lexington, London
December 2 2014
Words: Richard O'Hagan
Photo: Caroline Garden
Zola Blood make nice music, the sort of music you can imagine listening to on a warm summer’s Sunday lunchtime as you prepare the salad for the barbeque.
The problem is that this is a chilly Tuesday evening in December and this sort of amiable, very precise, burbling just doesn’t warm the cockles enough. Indeed, there’s an extent to which the band’s pursuit of technical excellence gives the whole show an air of four people taking an exam in ‘music and computing’ or some such subject, rather than actually putting on a performance.
Everything from debut EP ‘Meridian’ is on show tonight, with ‘Leaves’ being given a particularly plaintive workout. The high spot, though, is the unreleased ‘See the Sights’, which is one of the few numbers which really gets out of second gear and which builds to a pleasing crescendo in a way that the band would do well to emulate in future.
That’s really the crux of the problem with Zola Blood. Much of their recorded work rolls along at a single chilled-out pace and in a live setting this makes it hard for one track to stand out from another, to the extent where there are times where the audience seems unsure where a song is ending and another one starting. That, coupled with the band’s lack of movement onstage, makes for a time which is far from unpleasant and yet not all that energising, either.
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