Death Cab for Cutie, I’ve been a fan for years and they never had the decency to play any­where near my homet­own, until now. Grabbing myself a ticket on the day of first sale just to be sure; I was a little sur­prised that when I turned up even the dear ticket scalp­ers that are inher­ent with any Academy gig weren’t buy­ing tick­ets, appar­ently not as pop­u­lar a gig as I thought it’d be.

I have to come clean now and admit that I hadn’t actu­ally heard DCFC’s new album pre­vi­ously, mainly due to a crip­pling stu­dent debt, so didn’t quite know what to expect. Boy was I in for a shock; after the first three songs I con­sidered leav­ing. The fact that I didn’t know these songs didn’t enter into it, it was more the fact that singer Ben was sound­ing more and more like James Blunt every second. The rest of the band seemed com­pletely unin­ter­ested in being there and the over­all feel­ing in the build­ing seemed to be one of oppress­ive despair.

Cue ‘I will fol­low you into the dark’, sud­denly Ben’s voice, back to the one we all know and love, is cut­ting through the crowd, people are start­ing to sing and the other mem­bers of the band look like they’ve real­ised where they are. And this con­tin­ues all night, the mood shift­ing between joy­ous and appar­ent con­fu­sion. Songs such as ‘Title and Regis­tra­tion’, ‘What Sarah Said’ and ‘Transat­lan­ti­cism’ rever­ber­at­ing through­out the crowd, while the newer ones seemed flat and empty. Couple this with his ever-changing voice, trans­form­ing from song to song between his old favour­ite to the James-Blunt-alike. Maybe the band were just tired, maybe they were hav­ing a bad night, or maybe they were just as dis­ap­poin­ted in their latest release as we were.