Live at Whelan’s, Dublin

They say that you play venues like Whelan’s twice in your career – once on the way up, once in the other direction. The Stereophonics are somewhere between the two at the moment so their appearance at the Wexford St. venue has to be an unusual state of affairs. Indeed it is, part of a series of club dates designed to introduce new album Language, Sex, Violence, Other? and make the daily chore of talking to the press more bearable. You have to say the whole evening is handled well, the venue is full of genuine fans who get treated to a proper, fully electric show, and a mandatory donation on the door must have raised in the region of four grand for the tsunami appeal. The most remarkable aspect of the night is… well, that’s the problem; there isn’t anything really remarkable about it.
Given that their last visit here was to headline the more spacious surroundings of Slane, seeing the Stereophonics here feels oddly correct, as if clubs are more their natural environment than the arenas and stadiums they have progressed to. And thus the evening passes perfectly pleasantly yet without any real sense of event, certainly not when compared to the edge-of-the-seat entertainment Bloc Party provided here a couple of weeks ago. The new stuff is hit and miss – ‘Dakota’ (their best single in a while), ‘Brother’ and ‘Deadhead’ are all fine, but much of it is the kind of characterless rock that has made up too much of their canon of late. Indeed the fact that a B-side from the Word Gets Around period outshines all of the later stuff is a fairly good indication of their current dilemma.
‘Local Boy In A Photograph’ roundsoff proceedings, and is an all too brief taste of those days when they seemed able to combine hard rock and poetry in such a unique fashion, when they were most definitely on their way up.
Sure, they’ve got where they wanted to go but it’s just a shame that something got lost along the way.