Thursday, July 18, 2013
Tom Odell, Somerset House
Seated at a piano with floppy blond hair falling in front of his eyes as he reaches for tremulous high notes, Tom Odell looks every inch the sensitive singer-songwriter. Looks can be misleading though. The 22-year-old chart topping troubadour is not really that sensitive, at least not in the intimate, navel gazing, arty and literary way associated with the genre. Rather he is robust and poppy, with his piano led songs of unrequited love all building to big, singalong choruses delivered with key-thumping vigour, like a cross between Elton John and Noel Gallagher.
He has spoken in interviews about the inspiration of tortured, tragic composer Jeff Buckley, and while he has the looks and the voice to bear comparison, actually, the closest model is probably a solo Coldplay. He has something of Chris Martin's easy facility with melody, and likes to take his three piece backing band to dramatic, pummelling blasts of downbeat rhythm to balance the underlying sweetness of his hooks. "I want to see you dance like animals," he yells during an encore, which is not the kind of thing you would expect to hear at, say, a Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell gig.
It is all to the good though. The world has quite enough sensitive singer-songwriters right now. Odell is more mainstream and populist than that, a superstar in the making, with charisma to match his material. Odell was this year's BRITS critic choice winner and it hasn't taken him long to emulate the chart topping success of previous winners Adele, Florence & The Machine and Emile Sande. His debut album, Long Way Down, went straight to number one last week, and it is easy to see why. There was not much more to this gig than a man at a piano playing songs in a simple band set up on an open air stage in the Somerset House courtyard, but he was utterly compelling.
You don't have to be particularly familiar with his material to quickly catch on to his tunes, always delivered as if they are a matter of life and death to the singer. The band buoy his melodies with low, unusual backing harmonies, subtly surrounding him with sound but never overwhelming the key ingredients of piano and voice. And even though he was struggling with the latter, audibly croaking through certain passages, he had the wherewithal to make a virtue of weakness, turning his struggle to hit high notes into a drama in which the crowd was rooting for him like an underdog in a boxing ring.
Odell was due to support the Rolling Stones at Hyde Park last weekend but pulled out, fifteen minutes before showtime. "I got a terrible chest infection and I lost my voice," he told the crowd. "I was gutted." Explaining that "I've almost got it back but not quite", Odell pledged to do his best and asked for help to sing one of his favourite songs. "It's not a Rolling Stones song," he added, cheekily, before launching into a brash, punchy version of the Beatles 'Get Back'. It is a revealing choice of cover version. Nothing clever or artistically aspirational about it, just a big, cheesy crowd pleasing belter of a tune. This 3,000 capacity outdoor venue was a big step for Odell but I've got a feeling it is going to seem small before too long.
Source : http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568414/s/2ed99675/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cculture0Cmusic0Clive0Emusic0Ereviews0C10A1889660CTom0EOdell0ESomerset0EHouse0Bhtml/story01.htm
