SODA BLONDE

LIVE REVIEW – The Lexington, London, 23rd November 2023

The first date of a tour always provides an interesting balance of excitement, nerves and happiness for what is about to come. London’s The Lexington (definitely one of my favourite small venues in the capital) was the first stop for Soda Blonde on their current tour, and their first visit to the city for a number of years.

Although the band only formed under this name in 2019, the members have known each other for a good decade: most of them formerly made up the well-loved Little Green Cars. And that shows: there’s an easy chemistry on stage, which translates to super-tight, but never up-tight, playing. This is a band who know how to have fun with taking things seriously. They are fully and joyfully professional.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before Soda Blonde, we were treated to a performance from Dublin-based solo artist Shobsy – a good friend of the band who filled in for Jealous of the Birds at late notice. I can only describe that performance as astounding.

Shobsy delivers synth and electro-beats driven power pop, often singing in an incredible, soaring falsetto, occasionally turning to stentorian lower tones. He’s alone at centre-stage with a microphone and nowhere to hide. It takes a huge amount of courage and talent to get up as a support artist and belt out your material, to get into the zone while first on stage, to conjure up energy and dance around and expose all that you are – and all of this to an audience who mostly don’t know you or your music.

His cover of Small Town Boy was a landmark moment: unashamedly rebellious, and triggering a genuine and heartfelt crowd singalong. His own songs Driven and Vanity sounded great, and the picture was completed with performative elements like hand motions imitating a mirror in the second of those. Shobsy ended his set with a balladic piece performed at the piano, demonstrating that he’s capable of old-fashioned songwriting, too.

It’s been a long while since I’ve seen a support artist win a crowd over so quickly and completely; it was a fantastic warm up for the main act.

As I’ve already given away, that main act, Soda Blonde, display a very genuine inter-personal connectivity between the members. They’re at ease with themselves, and each other, and the stage feels like a natural environment for the four. Their set started with Dream Big, the title track from their most recent album, which came out on 8 September. Faye O’Rourke quickly showed off her impressive vocals here – you get a hint of her abilities on the recordings, but heard live there’s another dimension revealed. Yes, I feel obliged to mention the Kate Bush comparison, strong in the higher notes; but her lower range sounds almost classical, with some gorgeous vibrato pushing in at times.

From there, the band moved quickly to Bad Machine – a popular choice with its angular main synth and guitar riff, and dystopian reflections on tech in our lives. The bass sound was dirty as can be, with ragged drums and fervent, urgent vocals from Faye O’Rourke.

Next, it was back to material from the 2021 album Small Talk, an era of slightly mellower and more sweeping sounds, with Tiny Darkness. In that song, Faye really accentuates her vowels, squeezing out the words pointedly. On stage, she backs up her words with a unique charisma: she throws shapes, freezes and stares, brings out a cool, aloof persona for a few moments at a time – but then breaks into a grin at the thrill of it all.

By now, I’d been fully drawn into the Soda Blonde embrace, as they settled in for the main part of the set. Some highlights of this section were the newer song Space Baby, where the band indeed made great use of silence and space between sounds, and the chorus line “I need space baby, I need space baby, why do you call me baby anymore?” rang out; Small Talk, which was both crisp and smooth at the same time, showed off Faye’s vocal flexibility and range, and ended with a beautiful extended section of instrumental; and the profound anti-war anthem, Why Die For Danzig?, which combined a most beautiful piano chord progression with funky noodling guitars, crisply delivered beats, and all three other members contributing harmonies throughout.

“I’m a very spontaneous and anxious person – that’s a very difficult combination,” Faye commented before Less Than Nothing (a lyrically adept, poetic piece of storytelling), providing a moment of insight into what drives a lot of the songwriting. Those conflicting characteristics seem to come through in Soda Blonde’s music – there’s urgency and sometimes jitter, melded with smooth, sweeping sounds.

After a brilliant, energetic version of Heat Of The Night, Faye walked into the centre of the crowd with an acoustic guitar, along with Adam O’Regan for backing vocals and perhaps some moral support. Tuning that guitar proved to be a bit of a problem, but the relaxed way Faye and Adam dealt with it somehow added to the sense of a shared and down-to-Earth experience. The reason for this foray away from the stage was to deliver a bare, hard-hitting rendition of An Accident (a central song on the new album), a song with deep personal meaning for Faye, written about – and as a way of communicating with – her mother. This was always going to be one of those special moments – the respectful and obviously adoring crowd allowed the moment to really develop into something quite healing.

Once back on stage, it was time to wind the energy back up with a fabulously jazzy performance of My First Name: drummer Dylan Lynch was just spot on here, displaying a supple and relaxed style which let the song unfold satisfyingly.

“Good night”, Faye quipped immediately after the song ended, as the band strolled off for a few moments; there were two encores to come, Terrible Hands, played at full pelt with urgently delivered lyrics, and Going Out: sultry, silky, slinky – a long drawn out, smooth goodbye.

We didn’t really want that to be the end, and neither did the band it seemed, as they lined up for a group bow. They had obviously enjoyed the night and departed the room filled with confidence for the tour ahead; there was a sense of emergence and expectations being exceeded all round.

Soda Blonde are Faye O’Rourke (vocals, guitar), Adam O’Regan (keys, guitar), Donagh Seaver O’Leary (bass) and Dylan Lynch (drums). The band play a few more dates in Ireland before Christmas this year, and then resume with gigs across Europe in January 2024:

November

24th – Roisin Dubh, Galway, Ireland

25th – Dolan’s Warehouse, Limerick, Ireland

30th – Cyprus Avenue, Cork, Ireland

December

14th – Vicar Street, Dublin, Ireland

January

17th – Popup!, Paris, France

18th – Le Botanique, Brussels, Belgium

19th – Paradiso Kleine Zaal, Amsterdam, Netherlands

20th – Nochtspeicher, Hamburg, Germany

21st – Prachtwerk, Berlin, Germany