Deerhunter
-RITZ, MANCHESTER-
Walking into the Ritz on this bitterly cold Wednesday night, I could not help but feel a rather morbid atmosphere, no one looked like they had paid twenty-five pounds a ticket to be stood there. The weird yet at points interesting collaboration between front man Bradford Cox and support act Cate le Bon, took role as the support act for the night. Bradford had co-written some of her more recent work on her last album and I couldn’t help but feel the night was being overshadowed by this collaboration.
Deerhunter did not hit the stage until around a quarter to ten, already indicating that this was not going to be the longest of sets. Coming on with a slow version of the opening track off their new album Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, a track focusing on the idea that most of just work until we die, it really doesn’t seem to wake up the bored looking crowd. Deerhunter are known for their experimental sets, tonight they are working their way through their new album which is nothing new for a band, but at least do not do it when your set is only going to be twelve songs long.
There are moments of just pure awkwardness between songs, Brandon makes a shout out to a band that a former member of The Fall has gone on to form, to absolutely no applause. It would be understandable if he was talking about a band that had not had fifty plus members in their long history. Either way it led to a look of almost disgust from the frontman.
Finally, the band decide to give us the highlight of the evening in the form of ‘Desire Lines’. An undoubtably amazing track, made even more impactful by the nothing short of memorizing strobe lighting in the outro. A similar act of awkwardness came from the front man, after asking for a shout out to another unknown band to the audience this time leading to a member of the crowd to shout rather loudly “SHUT THE FUCK UP” to the crowd’s amusement and Brandon rather quickly going into another track from their album.
Now after looking at the sound man’s setlist I notice a fair few songs had been cut from the set. The band played their final tracks with Cate Le Bon and seemed to have cut out their encore, both ‘He Would Have Laughed’ and ‘Agoraphobia’ were cut from the setlist for the first time in what looks like a lot of sets after a scroll through their past setlists.
Overall, this night’s moments of musical excellence will be overshadowed by what I saw to be a pissed off, pretentious frontman who spat his dummy out at a simple lack of applause for a band he knew. It’s a shame as I know that Deerhunter are well more than capable of a twelve-song set missing out the fan favourites. For me just an act of pure unprofessionalism.
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