Frightened Rabbit - Academy Birmingham

Up to Brum with the Lad and his lady, sadly without IDS again despite this being a gig for one of his favs – Frightened Rabbit. Once again lined up in a tiny queue for our show this time next to a humungous line for Dave Matthews – pretty sure we made the right choice

An early show and so we weren’t expecting a second support, tonight in the shape of local Brummie band Goodnight Lenin. Despite being shamefully young ,the band knocked out some good stuff and got the crowd rolling along. In the mould of the current Mumford & Sons, Stornoway, stylee - they were rightly very well received put out some jolly banter good banter and would be well worth a second visit to one of their own shows – details on the Myspace site of course.

The publicised support Airship have been on my radar for a while and this was the second time of trying to see them. They were the first support for the Death Cab gig in Bristol last year, but who we missed by arriving too late. Their EP, Spirit of the Beehive, has a strong set of songs, but on the night they had a slightly distracted mein, and were woefully let down by the sound, particularly in the vocal department, overall sounding way to bass heavy and muddy. A disappointment but still worth trying a again – they are out on the road again with the wonderful Joy Formidable

Frabbit were also support for the aforementioned Bristol Death cab gig and so a headline show was much anticipated. Their sound was better but still too visceral in the bass area with a loss of treble and consequently much of the detail of the songs. None the less they delivered a good mix of new and older songs – interestingly some of the newer songs that felt least good on cd come over strongly live. So an enjoyable gig but not quite as great as I had hoped for due in the main part because of the rotten sound quality – why can’t sound engineers give as much attention to the top of the range as they do to the bass...sigh