As I had already confessed in one
of my pre-Sziget line up round ups, Passenger for me kept being the guy with
that intensively radio friendly song. And before we blow things out of
proportion: intensively radio friendly is not a derogatory term at all, it
simply denominates a very catch tune I very much like. Apparently there is
another very catchy song with a very similar title- namely Let It Be from the
sound track of Frozen and it ruined poor Passenger’s life as people kept
confusing them. If it offers any solace to Mike, Let It Be is intensively
hateful as far as I am concerned and cannot be mentioned on the same day as the
lovely Let Her Go.
Putting such technicalities aside
I now again come to the point where I am running for my life from the claws of
Martin Garrix’s vile onslaught of boring and annoying machine music. And get to
Passenger’s tent and have faith in humanity restored. If there’s any gimmick to
his show it’s that there aren’t any. He comes with a guitar, he plays great
tunes, he even does good covers. (This being one important take away of this
year’s Sziget- not everyone can cover songs graciously, and we should cherish
those who do.) He links his songs with little introductory bits that are
genuinely engaging and funny, something not all musicians can and/or want to
do- won’t elaborate on the Death Star pun here, as it was already mentioned in
the daily review, but that was one of those things that will etch the memory of
this concert in my mind as a Sziget classic.
I now have to confess I often
read bad reviews of concerts I liked just to pump up my adrenaline levels by
getting worked up over pretty much nothing. So here it goes, to the guy who
said Passenger was boring, you my friend have no soul left, because Avicii and
the Garrix person burned it out of you with lasers and musical mediocrity, and
are therefore utterly and irreversibly hopeless.
Now, I liked Florence and the Machine, I liked them a lot, I even sacrificed the superb insanity of a Future Islands concert so
I could watch the entire show, because it was riveting and never lost my
attention. I also thoroughly support the idea of many more female fronted, or
why not all female, headliners. There was however something that kept on
nagging at the back of my mind throughout, not quite taking a coherent shape.
There was something slightly off with the performance, I just couldn’t put in into
words.
As we have learned from any
detective novel that’s at least half decent, such case solving illuminations
always come when you least expect them, so the idea struck me in the dead of
night, while pondering going out to the kitchen for a little something: her
show is simply too structured for the outpour of emotion she would like to
convey with it. You should not really plan emotion, but she does- it’s not that
it isn’t really there, it’s just that it has, well, a machine built around it, that
functions like clockwork ginger. It’s a bit like the flower wreaths she keeps
popping on and off her head: pretty but ultimately plastic.
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