Bastille – 5 February 2017 (Sant Jordi Club – Barcelona)

Last Sunday, in the thick of a windstorms of about 100km/hour that hit the mountain of Montjuic, British band Bastille managed to attract a good amount of public and almost sold out the Sant Jordi Club, in which would be their first visit to the Barcelona. Dan Smith‘s band knows their strengths, that mix of pop and danceable electronic without stridencies and easily digestible where sometimes they add some rock guitar nuances trying not fall into the monotony, and their show was a continuous roller coaster in a search for a neutral rhythm with which to please everyone..

After a bored intro in which a news anchor warned of the arrival of the apocalypse, the first track of their setlist was “Set them off!“, and to our surprise after their disastrous concert at Lowlands 2015, they sounded powerful and clear, showing us that the band has developed its own character on the stage, the one  we missed much more than a year and a half ago in the Dutch festival. The quartet, accompanied by an extra guitarist and a trio of winds, managed to make the Sant Jordi Club sounded wonderfully (quite difficult..) in one of the hits of their first album Bad Blood as “Laura Palmer“, starting thus with an overflowing force that gradually was going down as minor songs from their new album like “Warmth” and “Snakes” were played. Aware of the comedown, Dan Smith himself jumped into the audience to sing “Flaws“, although as we said earlier in what would be the tonic of the night, its gaseous effect would fade as the singer played from the keyboard the exasperated slow “Oblivion” , which broke the atmosphere created moments before.

With this game of cat and mouse, six of one and half a dozen of the other, passed the middle part of a show that lived its best moment with the concatenation of “Lethargy“, the incredible “Things We Lost in the Fire” with spectacular video projections and “The Draw“. Before the drowsiness of a decaffeinated “Power“, the band chose for the endless chorus of “Bad Blood“, while after the time for the “extremely depressed” (in the words of own singer) “Four Walls (The Ballad of Perry Smith)” it was the turn of their new single “Blame“..  Behind that followed the performance from a mini stage next to the mixer of this tribute to the hymn of eurodance “Rhythm of the Night” by Corona that is “Of the Night“, in which it is necessary to emphasize that they have managed it in a good way, bringing it to their own style and updating it to their rhythm of percussions and synthesizers.

The weak lipdub on the screens for “Fake It” would be the start of about 15 minutes full of quality and hits, starting with the choruses with syllables elongated of “Weight of Living, Pt. II” or the best sound night in “Glory“, where the section of winds finally showed why they were on the stage and that was the perfect prelude to the 80’s style of “Good Grief“, first single of their last album that was sung in unison by the public and that meant the first farewell of the stage for the band. However, there would still be time for some encores that started with Dan Smith singing the ballad “Two Evils” from the balcony of the Sant Jordi Club and would continue with two of the best songs of the album that led they to the fame, “Icarus” and the well-known “Pompeii“, with which the public went crazy and danced to exhaustion, leaving a final sensation of euphoria that had little to do with the overall of the concert.

Bastille have now 7 or 8 songs that come easy, those that instantly rejoice you and with which you start dancing at the moment, but this way of using them as if they were lifeguards in their setlist only tarnish them, leaving us the sensation of being in a concert that never seemed to burst out.. And all this despite their show of lights and screens is amazing, its continuous interaction with the public is welcome, and as we said before, the sound and poise on stage has exponentially improved over the previous tour.. But they still lack that small step of knowing how to handle the times of a show in a correct way, because maybe  with 20 minutes less, their gig will stand out more.. Perhaps in the next season of summer festivals, with a forced reduction of songs by exigencies of the schedule, we can enjoy a remarkable concert.