MUSIC
Bastille
Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh
ONE of the more interesting and questioning British pop bands of their time, Bastille aren’t afraid to reflect the spirit of the age in uncompromising – and possibly slightly over- egged – fashion. “This next song is incredibly depressing and bleak, it offers no hope whatsoever but we like playing it,” says lead singer Dan Smith, politeandwell-spoken,before World Gone Mad. “Sorry, I’m really s**t at talking about our songs.”
The group’s sound and style doesn’t match up to such doomy rhetoric, with Smith bearing a voice which soars into the kind of hopeful question mark popularised by X-factor winners, even as his tone is perfectly suited to the icy keyboard lines of some of their darker tracks.
Bastille are a band who lean into the zeitgeist even as their era-specific sound might date them over time.
For the moment, however, their sound is perfect for their young target audience, from the shivering, xylophone-sounding keys of These Streets to the hint of something approaching cheerfulness during Warmth and the crowd favourite Laura Palmer.
With a song in their set – The Currents – explicitly written as a reaction to populism and their upcoming third album Doom Days apparently acting as a kind of anti-state of the world address, Bastille are a relative rarity – an unashamed pop group who apparently wish to connect in a tangible way with the world around them. On this evidence, much of their generation is with them all the way.