Amber Run @ Waterfront Studio

You can add Amber Run to that list of bands whose energy you probably won't really get until you see it brought together on stage and inhaled by a crowded room. Or maybe that's just me. In any case I wasn't quite ready for the size of this sound, especially considering the quintet's discography remains confined to a couple of EPs. There's a lot of people waiting for that first album with bated breath and it's easy to see why.It's true enough that the band is going through a period of transition, making the step up to headliners and finding their feet in that space. They'll get more comfortable with it in time but for the moment their set feels a bit baggy in the middle. For a few tracks the richness that permeates their best material seems to slip away into a section that ends up being - put bluntly - forgettable. Thankfully everything going on around this is pretty darn sweet. Pilot reaches for those anthemic heights that Amber Run appear to be gunning for. So too does crowd favourite Spark which brings with it mass singing and a collective salute of phone cameras that suddenly gives me fifty different angles on frontman Joe Keogh and nearly makes me weep for the world we live in. Ahem. Anyway. He's a damn good vocalist, this guy.The pick of it all is the impeccable I Found, a gentle explosion of a song that pulls together the best of what this band is doing; beefy lyrics, tender effects, muscled percussion, and harrowing harmony work that makes the air crackle. If you leave out the three-track shrug in the centre it's a set that blooms into something dreamily terrific and the delivery is spot on, alternating sombre intensities and chaotic outbursts that the five from Nottingham summon forth in almost organic unison. Watch out for Amber Run bringing down far larger houses than this in the near future.