Mew have been exporting their peculiarly Scandinavian variant of progressive rock with increasing success lately, and their show at the Empire marked another significant staging post in the process. The band, from Hellerup in Denmark, have been hailed as one of the leading lights in a new generation of groups for whom the experimental, otherworldly approach of Radiohead seems to have been a key influence.
They put on a show that was grandiose, dramatic, compelling and unpredictable, but also overwrought and, for much of the time, painful to look at. Spooky faces and nightmarish creatures loomed out from a giant screen behind the shadowy figures of the long-haired musicians, while five, freestanding lighting strips unleashed piercing white beams straight into the audience’s eyes.
The music was at times similarly inscrutable, and the lyrics even more so. Playing a set that was weighted in favour of songs from their current album, And The Glass Handed Kites, they manoeuvred a course through the dense, labyrinthine arrangements and phantasmagorical imagery of Why Are You Looking Grave? and Saviours of Jazz Ballet (Fear Me, December) with sure-footed skill and unswerving dedication to their cause. The frontman Jonas Bjerre sang in a clear tenor voice which, rather incongruously, owed a debt to the pop singing style of A-Ha’s Morten Harket.
She Came Home for Christmas, with its colossal, ringing chorus, echoed the feel-good anthems of the Flaming Lips, but other passages revived more painful memories of first generation prog-rock warhorses such as Yes and Barclay James Harvest. “Wake me up/ Only nightmares take me in,” Bjerre sang in White Lips Kissed, one of several songs that seemed to function as one huge, surging climax virtually the whole way through.
Perhaps the strangest thing of all was how such a systematically oddball performance could have felt so much of the moment.
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Tour details at www.mewsite.com