Too much of something

SO this weekend offered the previously mentioned Mew concert. This band has been playing together for the past 8 years or more, which makes them very talented musicians of course. Over the past couple of albums, most noticeable might be their latest "Mew and the Glass Handed Kites" from last year, the band has developed this mysterious sinister fairy tale-like universe wherein children turn into animals werewolf style, and cats dress up like Napoleon and play the violin. These images are used as inspiration for press photo shoots, CD booklet layout, website design and video montages at their live shows as well as music videos. This idea may have been brought to the working table by the hallucinations that the good ol' ganja have infused into the band members heads I don't know, but the case is that this image of Mew as an almost freak-wiccan cult is saturating every facet of what these guys do. This is necessarily bad, but what impression I was left with after Friday night's concert was that this band has to be careful not to become too stuck in their image. Sometimes music has to speak for itself and maybe Mew are aware that some of the basic elements of their songs vary very little so that they feel a need for a different and more far-out video montage on the back dropping of the stage in order to seperate one tune from the next. The show was kicked off with "Special", a personal favourite and probably the song from the latest album that stands out as the most differently sounding compared to the rest of the tracks, which worked really well live and "Am I Wry? No" felt like being placed inside of fireworks with the showing of a gigantic exploding fire-y sun on the back dropping appearing with each chorus. This was all very nice but the rest of the show slowly went down hill from there and became monotonous, all that changed were the lyrics and the back dropping display (animals with instruments, porcelin dolls with tiger heads, a dancing bear, rabies wolves). Audience members started calling for "Comforting Sounds", the band's masterpiece and euphorizing 8 minute track from 2004 album "Frengers", even before the band had ended the real set, proving that other than yours truely were feeling rather bored and just wanted to skip dinner and cut straight to the dessert. The track was served as the only(!!) encore song, and the concert was over.
In the wardrobe section I overheard some people assessing the idea that the band had been playing to a tape, because of the lack of improvisation and over-all similarity between live and studio versions of the songs. Ladies and gents this is not the kind of impression you want to leave your fans with after you've just poured 10 gallons of sweat on the stage. I am hopeful, however, that this band will keep evolving and maybe next time round offer something completely different and perhaps a little bit more refreshing after 5-6 listenings of the album still.

Video montage of the concert experience to be found HERE

"Lost in the woods? What do you mean?"