Bush Hall is a chandelier-lit oasis in an area lined only with fast-food emporiums, ticket touts (Mos Def at the Empire, the rather forbidding building next door to which is pictured above) and at least one too many identically-named tube stations, so visiting it twice in just over a week was a bit of a treat.  Doors on time tonight, and no free-for-all for seats either, so all was to my liking.  And the opportunity to further attempt to digest the rich pudding of songs that was Efterklang’s Parades album was to be welcomed too, assuming there was room after the bigos and golobki I’d been washing down with vodka at Patio on Goldhawk Road.  (Took my mind off the then impending house move too, which is currently rendering my internet access somewhat intermittent - apologies if blogging is somewhat lighter than usual).

The luxuriantly-bearded Denis Jones played before the tardier types (that means you, Milkman) turned up.  He began with an undistinctive small band, including trumpet and saxophone, which did him little favours, but got rather better rather quickly when he was left to his own devices – said devices being mainly guitar, voice and looping pedals.  Before the plug was rudely pulled, he was building (most compellingly) a version of Tom Waits’ “Clap Hands” using the crackle from a live guitar lead. 

Perhaps worryingly for Efterklang, the quality of the support acts got even better when part-time member Peter Broderick played a stunning solo set on piano, violin, guitar, and saw, all looped and knitted together in dizzying yet delicate fashion.  At one point he even sampled the end of our applause for one song to form the basis of the next, before ending the set on stage with all of Efterklang, leading the crowd’s typically inhibited chanting of a vocal melody.  In our defence, it wasn’t that easy to sing.  Unsurprisingly, given the abundance of talent he exhibited, he sold out of his entire tour’s worth of handmade CD-Rs when he finished.

As you can gather from my original review and the comments it attracted, Efterklang’s Parades walks the line between being a multifaceted work of some genius, and being bloated and overblown. Live, however, the songs are much more three-dimensional, with the components feeling more distinct (maybe it is a visual thing – I can see the instrumental separation, hence I felt it).  They played pretty much all of it too:  “Polygyne”, “Mirador”, “Caravan”, “Horseback Tenors” and “Cutting Ice To Snow”.   Perhaps I’ve just been baffled into near-familiarity by now, but I did find myself noticing at just how many of these songs break down into a neat choral arrangement before coming back in with a pounding drum rhythm.  It did leave me with considerable fondness for the simper yet more esoteric older tracks – such as “Swarming”, and “Step Aside”, which came with their crackling electronics and original sparkle intact.

Speaking of sparkle, I shouldn’t end without mentioning the costumes.  Most of Efterklang were wearing what I assume is traditional Danish dress – braces, breeches and, erm, sequined shoes.  An Efterklang show is very much a performance, particularly from the camper-than-Pontins Casper Clausen, dancing and drumming and demonstrating down front whilst sporting a moustache which prompted some wicked Borat references from some crowd members who had obviously consumed a little more vodka than I had.  As such, it was hard to leave anything other than satisfied.  A little stuffed maybe, but nothing I couldn’t burn off on the longer-than-you-remember walk back between those annoyingly-titled tube stations which disgrace this part of Beck’s map.