Just over a year ago MV saw Klone opening for Devin Townsend. It is interesting looking back at the review, that night we made mention of the textures, of the Yin and Yang to their material and the fact the French band wanted to take you on a journey.
Tonight, they’re playing acoustic, and all of those things are strangely perhaps more evident even than they were.
Even as they profess a thrill at being back in the UK, work like “Up In Flames” and “Grim Dance” belongs in the shadows from where they almost literally play this evening. There is a hypnotic quality to the rhythms they produce on “Immaculate Desire” and “Bystander”. The cover of Soundgarden’s black hole sun works spectacularly well but this is really celebrating the diversity of Klone’s material, and to that end, a passionate “Yonder” and perhaps the highlight “Rocket Smoke” do that job superbly.
There are certain bands that really lend themselves to this type of acoustic exploration and Klone are very evidently one of them.
“We’ve been together over 20 years….” says Mariusz Duda, to the crowd in Birmingham, as if he can’t really believe it himself, but the time goes by so fast.
And that suits a band like Riverside simply because the Polish quartet do not appear to want to be pigeonholed and want to evolve constantly. Opener “#Addicted” sort of lurks, before they do burst out with the extremely strident “Panic Room”. This is the penultimate show in support of last year’s “ID Entity” record, and they have obviously done a lot of searching to find their place in the world. Songs from it like “Big Tech Brother” and “Landmine Blast” Take them to the outer reaches that they’ve never been before. Not least because as Duda says: “We have got bored of the melancholy.”
As ever with a Riverside live gig, songs are not the same versions that you hear on the record, they may not even be the same versions that you hear tomorrow (“it depends on how many mistakes we make! Jokes Duda) but given that the band has the skill to take the music wherever they choose at a given moment this can thrill. “Lost (Why Should I Be Frightened Of A Hat?” Each one of the benefits from this approach, as Maciej Meller excels on his guitar.
The truth about “Post Truth” is that it is stunning. The musicianship that the band has appears to have improved over the years, and the way they do “Place Where I Belong” and the chants seem ready for stadiums, then it might be too glib to say they belong right here.
“Egoist Hedonist” is proof that their repertoire can be surprisingly catchy, an epithet you can also add to “Friend Or Foe” as the synth from Michał Łapaj is quite wonderful – indeed he plays a starring role all night.
The encore of “Self-Aware”/”Driven To Destruction” injects a real rock energy into proceedings, before they finish with “Conceiving You” That one encapsulates more or less the whole show, given that Duda not only carries it with his exceptional bass playing, but he is also a real frontman in a way that perhaps he’s only in the last few years, had the confidence to become.
As they play the closing crescendo, one of several breakdowns throughout the gig of genuine heaviness, you are reminded of the rest of what Duda had said, along with “We’ve been going over 20 years.”
He’d followed it up with, “and we are Riverside, nothing else.”
They’re too modest for the rest and it’s this: over the course of those two decades, they have become one of the most accomplished and captivating Prog bands around.
