2023-06-07 10:50:28
The Canadian band knew like no other how to set music to the time before Corona, war and inflation. Since then, little has happened to them. That’s enough for the guests.
Alvvays in BerlinMartin Mueller
Alvvays belong on Spotify and not on stage. In fact, one should have known. You don’t hear the withdrawn Canadians with the gently jingling indie pop at parties or when waking up in the morning. Alvvays plays the music of a wet summer Saturday afternoon before the rain stops and you head out for a convivial dinner. Alvvays runs from the car loudspeakers on the ironic road trip, but not on the stage of the sold-out Astra Kulturhaus on the RAW site.
On Tuesday evening, the band seemed to feel the same way when they entered the stage an hour after the official start of the concert, only to stop working on the musical instruments after a good hour, yes, it sounded like auditions. As if she didn’t really belong there. The exclamation of the shy singer Molly Rankin at her only concert in Germany was particularly ironic: “We’re only ever in Berlin for such a short time.” Yes, then at least start earlier or play longer. Pfff.
Longing for the pre-pandemic
Alvvays is a band that so inimitably expressed the diffuse, exhausted ennui of the pre-corona and pre-war and pre-inflation years. With their album of the same name in 2014, they delivered songs of a sympathetic indifference that are unparalleled. After this time, many in the audience probably longed for their return, in which there were many Xhainer couples who probably got to know each other while “Ones who Love You” or “Next of Kin” was playing in the background.
But the album is and remains a masterpiece, no matter what the band delivers on stage. The successor “Antisocialites” was able to tie in with “Dreams Tonite” or “Plimsoll Punks” in 2017. The former was heard on Tuesday. But alongside their biggest hit “Marry Me, Archie,” there was hardly any good stuff, just the vague, unmemorable bits from 2022’s hit “Blue Rev.” That’s how they started and that’s how the encore ended. What a mistake.
If you want to give a dog a bitter pill, you have to hide it in juicy meat. Alvvays hid small scraps of fillet in a medicine patty. A project song can also be pushed between the many hits. But not vice versa. Because even through repetition, the new songs, which are not particularly popular according to the Spotify views, hardly become more popular.
Too young to understand their success?
Maybe they’re tired of repeating their first two big hits. Maybe in their mid-30s they’re still too young to see what great things they’ve achieved and don’t yet appreciate what it means to have hit the mark once – or even twice. Over the pandemic, Alvvays should have reinvented themselves, but it’s like the light has fallen through the weeping willows onto their prism for too long. Now everything is diffuse.
But the longing for this sound, after that time when the private was still allowed to be the greatest drama in the world, hasn’t gone away. This is probably one of the reasons why the audience celebrated the five-piece band happily. Even if there is no turning back.
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