Well he's joined by a female vocalist stage-left as she and he reproduce the vocal work of startling debut LP Wander / Wonder to varyingly convincing extents. Her voice pertains to the accomplished yet average coo of a Celine Dion-inspired cruise liner crooner, while Koone's cracks at every high he barely hits. Quintessentially gawky and glowering out from beneath grey hoodie, he limp-wristedly caresses mic cable while manning a MacBook that blurts out the calming opening refrain of Motion. However every breathy sigh of "Now that you've gone" sounds crude and gaudy without significant processing and just as with oOoOO's universally harangued foray into live showing the dynamic provides more of a desecration than glorification of the record.
Motion segues a little scrappily into the blippy, typically aqueous Siddhartha on which the pair duet with the unadulterated schmaltz of prime Broadway schmooze, before they delve deeper into disaffection-inducing mawkishness on Await as we're left longing to recede into bottomless caverns of cringe. The sound of sloshing water again gushes through the instore speakers – which are given a thorough and indeed thoroughly sonorous rinse this evening, truth be known – adding further discomforting dampness to the already-sodden emotionalism of this half hour. Koone stops for a second, hoists up his "pants", smirks, and again grasps the mic to grimace through the once-glimmering, now-grim Expect during which wayward moans of getting it right and sleeping "to the light" clash particularly awkwardly. Oh, Why remains immersive and intimate even in this inopportune locus, its childlike daze building continually in momentum and majesty yet the subaqueous whale songs of Wander / Wonder that once sounded as comforting as all music must prenatally from the other side of bulbous belly are here beached and left to simmer in excessively and unwarrantedly dour sentimentality. Koone may still be acclimatising to the hype and bright lights although evidently he still hasn't got this one right.
