Live Review: Kurt Vile @ Sound Control, Manchester

Date: Monday 5th September

Words: Will Orchard

On a brisk, damp Manchester night it’s sweet relief to have tonight’s gig to look forward to. While outside sheets of rain prove the summer is coming to an end, a sweltering Sound Control and a soundtrack of warm desert rock, courtesy of Kurt Vile, is a welcome tonic.

Opening with a hushed, finger-picked solo version of ‘Blackberry Song’ Vile’s guitar prowess is immediately evident. It’s a swirling rush of echoes chords, delicate and powerful at the same time, and brings to mind the most introspective moments of Iron and Wine’s ‘The Creek Drank The Cradle’.

Such calmness is short-lived, though, as Vile’s three-piece band join for ‘Runner Ups’ to bolster his strumming with muscle and aggression. Take ‘On Tour’, whose wandering album version is given a buoyant reinterpretation, with drummer Mike Zanghi leading from the back while Vile's effect-laden guitar swirls like clouds over the top. It’s arguably the set’s highlight, a brief foray into dreampop that retains a backbone of insistent rhythm and surges into a brief, near-psychedelic breakdown. Yet where Vile’s impressive playing is bolstered with the addition of a band, all too often – as in ‘Overnight Religion’ – his vocals are shrouded in a haze of reverb that renders his lyrics barely comprehensible.

Considering one of the factors that made this year’s Smoke Ring For My Halo such a standout album was his ditching of the woozy, mumbling style of his earlier albums in favour of a clearer production, it’s a letdown that such a progression hasn’t happened in his live show. For such an original lyricist, that a majority of the show, especially the tracks Vile picks from his earlier albums, are lyrically unfulfilling overshadows an otherwise impressive performance

An entirely 50/50 split of quality, then; where Vile and his band craft both tender acoustic blues and explosive rock, sometimes in the space of a single track, their efforts are let down by Vile’s vocal laziness. His downbeat Lou Reed-esque sighs may sit comfortably on record, but onstage they’re more frustrating than charming.

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