Exlovers

By Megan Walker

As the lights dimmed slightly, the shy five-piece walked on to the stage to a half filled Leeds Metropolitan University Student Union. A mixed age crowd stood silent. Warming up for their Glastonbury appearance later this year, the band simply introduced themselves as the Ex-Lovers and launched into their first song “This Love”.

With their catchy guitar riffs and interesting lyrics the London group seemed to catch the interest of the very intimate audience, causing many to dance along. Included in those who were dancing many middle-aged people, proving quite surprising due to the quite grungy and heavy music which was performed. The interesting contrast between boy/girl vocals were definitely a main highlight of the bands set, complimenting the catchy guitar riffs perfectly.

On stage, the band unfortunately appeared to make little crowd interaction until further on in the set. This proved a little disappointing, as when they entered the stage initially they seemed to be full of energy. The band also seemed to lack stage presence and this was noted by a lot of the audience. When the band did try to talk to the crowd, lead singer Peter Scott seemed to be mumbling a lot and therefore unfortunately wasn’t able to fully interact with the audience.

The third song of their set “Wish We’d Never” came across quite mellow, suggesting that the band were very versatile in their mixture of slow and faster tempo songs in their set. Despite this, the reluctant audience did not seem to really take to this song very much and simply just stood, with the odd member of the crowd swaying from side to side.

The band ended their set on “Emily”, which gained the most audience support. The bright and breezy lyrics again complimented the boy/girl vocal contrast of the band. At this point, many of the audience began to dance much more energetically than in any previous song suggesting that the awkward audience finally began to enjoy and warm to the music Ex-Lovers were performing.

Playing quite a long set for a support band, with 8 songs and around a 40 minute slot, Ex-Lovers had several attempts at grasping the audience’s full attention; however they did not seem to do so. Due to this, the band sounded a lot better recorded than live on that night and were much more stationary on stage than expected throughout their set, in contrast to many other band’s live sets. This may have led fans to be disappointed by the live set performed that night, in comparison to Exlovers recorded songs which are outstanding.