Returning to their hometown on a Saturday night was visibly a big deal for White Lies. Despite the dark aesthetics and morbid topics of their songs, the band couldn’t hide their joy at playing this grand, full to-the-brim East London venue. After catching them numerous times during their first two records, I was interested to see if the band had retained the raw emotion and epic nature of those early shows. I wasn’t disappointed.

The euphoric choruses, big hooks and pulsating rhythms are tailor-made for a live environment, with the three-piece well aware of this. A decade of touring seems to have taught them which song elements to hold back on, which to elongate and when to explore. They’ve gradually turned into masters of their craft.

However, despite nailing the live show, they don’t have enough songs in their back catalogue of sufficient quality to do the musicianship total justice. This is reflected in the set list, with To Lose My Life still in possession of the greatest number of songs despite it being the oldest LP. The band have never quite recaptured the raw emotion and menacing atmospheric compositions the debut brought us, with Ritual an overly polished rock record with too many commercially viable hooks and Big TV an album in which the band were struggling to define what they were anymore.

Recent record Friends did signal a slight change of style, however, and while it left the Ealing natives no closer to salvaging their original raw prowess, the synthetic nature of the album does lend itself to this type of situation, with the opening two tracks of the show ‘Take It Out on Me’ and ‘There Goes Our Love Again ‘ igniting the crowd from the offset.

Meanwhile, ‘Swing’- a song making its live debut – was one of the surprise highlights of the night as the Portishead-esque synthetic soundscape reverberated through the floors of the old theatre: “I took the life of soul from every dream/Until it sucked the life and soul from me,” cried Harry McVeigh. These dark, mournful rhyming couplets evoke the sensation of the group’s early days, leading the crowd into a nostalgic haze. And nostalgia was the order of the day, with the likes of ‘To Lose My Life’, ‘Farewell to the Fairground’ and ‘Unfinished Business’ gaining the biggest crowd reaction, particularly ‘Death’- a track you feel will always remain the band’s greatest and most potent weapon. However, it only closed the main part of the show, with the four live members coming back out to perform the melancholic ‘Big TV’ and extravagant ‘Bigger Than Us’ for the encore. Ending the night in inspirational fashion.

Whilst White Lies lack the lyrical intensity of their post-punk cousins such as Editors, Preoccupations and Interpol, they still possess the ability to put on an impressive performance. They may no longer be releasing critically-acclaimed albums, but the sheer brilliance of their live shows dictates they’ll be playing venues of this size in the future.
Paul Hill

Website: whitelies.com
Facebook: facebook.com/WhiteLies
Twitter: twitter.com/whiteliesmusic