Kalev

Following ten minutes or so of sorting out their intruments to the accompaniment of impressively squalling feedback, Kalev's black-clad, big-haired band members take to the stage and kick straight into their industrial electro funk rock set. Underpinned by the grinding hiss of synths and some extremely accomplished drumming, it’s a full-on, exceedingly stylised Mars Volta-esque racket. Kalev don’t speak a word to the audience and don’t break between songs, running the whole set together into one seamless 45 minute performance. Over all this the singer howls and jerks his way through a very self-conscious vocal line and accompanying dance of the kind which one can’t help but suspect was rehearsed in front of a mirror…

Rehearsed, practised, seamless, self-conscious, accomplished… these are key words. Because Kalev’s gig tonight is first and foremost a performance, a show. And there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that, just as there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with not saying a word to your audience. Live shows should aim to entertain, which implicitly hints at an element of performance, and plenty of bands use a lack of pauses and banter to wind up the intensity of their show and do so to very good effect. But the thing is that performance is nothing without commitment, and a lack of direct engagement with the audience has to be replaced with an emotional hook to engage the audience by other means. Kalev have no noticeable commitment, nor do they display any emotional investment in their sound – they could almost have learnt the trade from some “rock’n’roll by numbers” correspondence course, and any band who give that impression must surely be missing the point somewhat. Their live set feels intellectually lazy and incredibly complacent: Kalev appear to think that a polished performance is an adequate substitute for noticeably giving a damn.

Well, it ain’t so. And while I was initially impressed by Kalev’s full-on and attention-grabbing noise assault, my interest quickly waned as the set went on and it became clear that the band weren’t at any point going to visibly give a damn about the music they were playing. Kalev put nothing real into their performance, there was no trace of passion or fire… and it therefore came as something of a shock when the singer charged into the audience at the end of the show, pushing people aside with bruising force and shattering glass across the floor. Had the band displayed any emotional commitment at all before this point, this could’ve been seen as a discharge of pent-up emotions – as it was, it came across as a petulant attempt to provoke the audience reaction to which Kalev seemed to think they were automatically entitled simply by dint of being a technically competent band playing a technically competent show. But it doesn’t work like that. If you give the audience nothing but a slick-yet-empty performance, you can’t expect anything back from them. Kalev fundamentally Don’t Get It, and this is painfully evident in their polished but soulless live act.