London’s Bombay Bicycle Club Performs Stellar Show At Metro

Mar 17, 2024 admin_bitlc Features, Music News, Reviews 0

By Peter Thomas Ricci

The long history of rock and pop music is rife with examples of the great flare out – a band or musician with fine promise that, for reasons that are rich and varied, burn to ash and fail to reach their full potential. It may happen after an EP, a debut album, and maybe even two or three albums (if we’re lucky), but the fact remains that there are precious few musical acts that are both longstanding and continuously inventive.

London’s Bombay Bicycle Club is such an act. Formed nearly two decades ago when Suren de Saram, Jamie MacColl, Ed Nash, and Jack Steadman met when they were teenage students at independent schools, the band experienced immediate success when it was one of two winners of Virgin Mobile’s “Road to V” competition in 2006. Since then, BBC has released six stellar albums – the most recent 2023’s exceptional “My Big Day” – and across those albums, the group’s music has only grown more adventurous, more mature, more dynamic, and dare I say, more fun and enjoyable.

Those qualities were in ecstatic abundance during BBC’s Thursday night concert at the Metro, where they performed with splendor and delight to a massively positive crowd. Whether they were blasting through their newer compositions or bringing a fresh edge to established classics like “So Long, See You Tomorrow” and “Always Like This,” BBC brought a key understanding a live performance that was as refreshing as it was exciting. Throughout their last three albums, BBC has developed a mastery of the studio, and in the process curated a rock/pop sound that incorporates sampling and electronics to their core guitar/bass/drums instrumentation; the opening horn samples of “Get Up,” for instance (the opening track to 2020’s superb album “Everything Else Has Gone Wrong”) signals quite clearly a poise and sophistication far beyond 2009’s “I Had the Blues but I Shook them Loose” (although that is still excellent).

Such a sound, though, is the product of years of writing, tinkering, and revising; a live performance to an adoring crowd, by contrast, is an entirely different matter, and that is the pivotal understanding of Bombay Bicycle Club. Knowing that the intricacies of those studio recordings will not translate to the live stage, the group instead leans into its exceptional musicianship, with Suren de Saram’s powerful drumming and Ed Nash’s pulsating bass particularly revelatory. Simply put, there was an energy and muscularity to the tracks that both set them apart from the studio renditions while also not taking anything away from them – returning to the group’s recorded output, still enraptured in the post-concert haze, I found that none of the recorded track’s power has been lost.

Sometimes, a concert’s closure brings with it a sort of sorrow – the realization that you’ve experienced an iteration of a musician that may never be equaled. After two solid decades of one-upmanship – and such palpable glee on the stage that I now have a level of happiness to aspire to in my own life – it’s safe to say that there were no sorrowful notes from Bombay Bicycle Club’s set at the Metro, and that if we’re blessed with a seventh studio album at some point in the future, that it will yield the same delight, the same poise, the same zigs and zags that we’ve come to anticipate.

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