Embrace & The Delays - London Hammersmith Apollo - 29/9/06
4/5
By: Matt Tomiak
The author F Scott Fitzgerland famously remarked that there are 'no second acts in American lives.' Perhaps unsurprisingly, Fitzgerald's views on whether the same maxim was applicable to the careers of anthemic northern indie bands remains unrecorded. Regardless, Embrace's unlikely yet highly gratifying post-2004 resurgence has been the stuff of Gatsby-esque renaissance. This is especially true in light of some particularly grotesque Stalinist revisionism conducted in certain quarters of the UK press, whereby it was apparently decided in to eliminate wholesale Embrace's early acclaim and popularity in all subsequent discussion of the band.
Two and a half years on from their debut album and with this year's beefed-up 'You See Colours' a contender for album of the year, The Delays seem more than a little incongruous in a supporting role. Those who disregard them as flimsy indie waifs are way off the mark: check the glistening, transcendent pop of 'Nearer Than Heaven', chunky nu-britpop stomp-a-long 'Hideaway' and 'This Town's Religion' -'a song about chavs', according to helium-voiced singer Greg Gilbert. The astonishing 'Valentine', a barely credible but brilliant mesh of the Charlatans, The Pet Shop Boys and Girls Aloud- brings down the curtain on a band who patently deserve a bigger platform.
Embrace, meanwhile, are a band who know just a little bit about large-scale performance: having re-established themselves at the top of the rock tree once more, they're not in the business of understated half-measures on stage. Certainly, Danny McNamara appears just a little too keen on, erm, embracing his inner Bono on the super-slick and unabashedly stadium-sized newer material like 'Sainted' and 'Exploding Machines.' Still, he's not lost the knack for ungainly yet infectious gusto, cheerfully dismissing rumours of the band's imminent retirement ('I'll still be doing this when I'm 60!) and imploring the audience to boogie during a particularly festive rendition of 'Save Me'. 'Come on!' he yells. 'It's a f***ing Friday!'
Older followers might gripe about the lack of variation in the set over the past couple of years (how's about dipping a little further into 'The Good Will Out' and 'Drawn From Memory', eh chaps?), but rock democracy triumphs as website poll winning B-side 'Feels Like Glue' is given an airing. And an encore comprising stately newie 'Heart and Soul', the poignant 'Fireworks -'still heartrending after almost a decade - and a celebratory 'Ashes' are diverse enough reasons to celebrate Embrace's revitalization.
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