Music > Live Reviews

Embrace

EPIC Studios

08/04/18

I have to confess that is my first ever visit (for a gig anyway) to the Epic Studios in Magdalen Street this evening and I am quite impressed - it's spacious, is plenty comfortable for the decent size crowd and looks like we are only in half of it.

Tonight, Embrace roll into Norwich, just some fifteen months after their previous appearance in the city, only last time at the Waterfront.

But this evening is a totally different kettle of fish altogether, as last time around the sound was dire, it felt like they and their sound was just too big for the venue to be perfectly honest, things were just not up the normal Embrace high standards. It simply didn’t float my boat and I left King Street at the time feeling very disappointed indeed. Either way it was as it turns out, maybe it was just one of those nights.

I have seen them many times now and this evening they are on it, on the front foot from the off. Danny McNamara is looking in great shape too, he and the band seem to have a real spring in their step during the almost two hour set, made up of 17 tracks, both old and new.

They look like a band that are really enjoying themselves and really want it still - we are informed that 2019 will be the twenty first birthday of their debut album The Good Will Out and that they are hoping to tour with it. Tonight more than whets the appetite for that to happen - not only is there some real desire from the band, the fans very clearly want it too based on their reaction when Danny’s gives out the potentially exciting news.

For tonight though, on the Love Is A Basic Need Tour, we are treated to many of the old favourites such as All You Good Good People, Nature’s Law, One Big Family, Ashes, the amazing Someday and the closer, The Good Will Out. The new album, their seventh, is right up there. Probably their best album since Out Of Nothing, it has some classic Embrace themed songs running right the way through it. Wake Up Call, Where You Sleeping, Love Is A Basic Need, All That Remains and Never all get a play and go down extremely well with the followers.

It's one big singalong right the way through the set as tonight it really does feel like One Big Family, such is the banter and dialogue with the audience. We all go home so looking forward to the next tour, hoping that it really will happen. If it does it will be a very special occasion, a big celebration of a band that have been there and done it and then gone and done what many bands fail to do, to still be together after over twenty years. Fair play to one of the best bands to come out of the late nineties.

We are certainly looking forward to the next appearance with much anticipation. Roll on 2019.