Fanfarlo

Perhaps in keeping with the sonic hues of the new “Let's Go Extinct”, an early taste of spring greets Fanfarlo's Milan date at the Tunnel. The London band, led by the Swedish-born Simon Balthazar, is tasked with confirming just how substantial the fresh stylistic turn towards eighties pop on their latest record really is. The curiosity, in short, lies in finding out whether Fanfarlo have truly left behind a sound that, Smiths-ian pulsations notwithstanding, has from the start marked them out as one of the most American-indie-sounding bands on the current British music scene, or whether those ties that earned them so much praise still hold firm.

The on-stage approach turns out a bit hesitant, disoriented, whether due to a deliberate lack of visual impact or to a sonic palette that stays lush only in intention, translating into a performance that's somewhat restrained and by-the-book, draining the sound of the vibrations it needs.

Luckily, the quality of the songs is in many cases good, and so when they kick off with the opening “Ghosts”, these issues fade into the background in favour of a sparkling uptempo number steeped in melancholy, just lightly spiced up by the trumpet — though good old Leon Beckenham, the keyboardist lent out to horn duties, seems to be itching to put it down and rest. Next comes the joyous romp of “Life In The Sky”, the track that opens the new album and proves, even live, to have plenty of fuel left to warm the hearts of those present, while the ballad “Deconstruction”, less fleshed-out by its very nature, still betrays that same sketchiness glimpsed earlier. It's on these ups and downs that the unevenness of the show takes shape as it goes on, further sealed by the Solomon-like choice to split the setlist equally among the three studio albums.

The result is that what suffers is the consistency of a performance that is, in itself, perfectly decent, but which raises more than one doubt about how convinced Balthazar and his friends (the bearded bassist Justin Finch, kitted out in an olive-green coat like a park-maintenance worker, the pale violinist Cathy Lucas, the aforementioned Leon Beckenham, and the excellent Valentina Magaletti on drums, unfortunately crammed into a corner of the stage, with all that entails) really are about having taken a path far removed from the folk-rock itch of early Arcade Fire, a name the band has always had to reckon with.

In the end, nothing really settled our curiosity, between a few rough edges and some genuinely engaging moments, for an evening that certainly can't be called a write-off, but one that won't go down among the best live performances of the year.

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