ghostpoet

It’s been a while since Obaro Ejimiwe, Ghostpoet, has played in Copenhagen, in this very same venue. The crowd, he jokes, has increased since then. A guest appearance with Massive Attack, and the reception for last year’s Dark Days + Canapés, will do that.

Another reason might be that all the opening bands’ schoolmates and parents seem to have showed up, lending the evening the feeling of a local gig, but if Ejimiwe notices the vibe he is too charming to mention it. In general the murkiness  of the material in his last album is contrasted by his open onstage persona, grooving along with the backing band. They open on perhaps the strongest track from Dark Day, the appropriately titled “Many Moods at Midnight”, with a simmering, Bad-Seed-channeling intensity.

Of course in a live settings a lot of the albums’ atmospherics are lost to the room, and Ejimiwe’s rather low-key vocal delivery sometimes struggles to cut through the band, who transpose the material into a decidedly more straight-forward indie rock tonality, all wiry guitars, grungy bass and some pleasant bleeps from a couple of nice Moog and Prophet synths. In this context songs like “X Marks the Spot” start to sound rather more like the Editors that I am comfortable with (the Editors being only the second most boring concert I have ever attended after Chvrches).