I'm heading off to the Brudenell Social Club on a cold Monday night at the end of January to see Valerie Poxleitner, better known as Lights. The Canadian singer songwriter is touring the UK promoting her third album, 'Little Machines', which has taken three years to complete after her successful and acclaimed album 'Siberia' .
First up though, K.Flay, a rapper from San Francisco, accompanied by a pretty cool drummer who was banging out the beats alongside a backing track while K.Flay gave an energetic performance stopping only a few times to interact with the crowd or to jump on the keyboards. The young student crowd seemed to appreciate her efforts, judging by the sounds they were making.
After setting up the ton of keyboards and gear, which swamped the stage and made me wonder how the band were going squeeze in, Lights came on to an almost full house. She started slowly, sat down at a keyboard right at the front of the stage, making things very intimate before moving to one of the other many keyboards standing up centre stage. Lights was accompanied by three other band members, and they played through their indie pop dance tunes like a well oiled (little) machine.
The crowd were loving it and Lights had plenty of banter with them, even mentioning the closing of The Cockpit in Leeds which she had played at before. There was also some in-band debate going on as to whether Canada have Dolphins or not.
They slowed things down after a while, with the stand out track from the new album in my opinion being 'Portal', which sounded fantastic and had the crowd entranced. She then moved back to the sit down keyboard to do another slow number, before cranking it up again with the new single 'Running With The Boys', which got things bouncing again.
I went in tonight not expecting to get too much out of the gig, as although I really like the acoustic version of her second album, as well as 'Portal' from Little Machines, the rest is a bit sugary pop for my taste. Yet I was pretty impressed with how well they played, and they certainly have a large youth following which can only be a good thing for the future. I can see Lights progressing in the next few years and playing at bigger venues, if only to have room for all the gear. Oh, and yes, they do have Dolphins in Canada - I looked it up.
FUTURE GIGS
sorry, we currently have no gigs listed for this act.