Annelotte de Graaf, AKA Amber Arcades has recently swapped her career as a lawyer for one in music, and she arrives at Birmingham’s excellent Hare & Hounds venue tonight to promote recent debut album Fading Lines.
Local lads Hoopla Blue are one of two excellent supports this evening; their traditional guitar / bass / drums set up is stretched into a sound all of their own, as they lay on the effects but not at the expense of their rather marvellous songs. They are enthusiastically accepted by the pleasingly ample audience, as is second ‘special guest’ Ella van der Woude, who makes her music under the name of Ella. It turns out that she is actually also part of Amber Arcades’ band, along with guitarist Manuel van den Berg. The two of them conjure up some hauntingly beautiful tunes, hovering somewhere between The xx and the more chilled side of Portishead. De Graaf herself joins in on the last song before the three take a short break and then return to the stage for the main Amber Arcades set.
Easing gently into album closer ‘White Fuzz’, it is a subtle start that actually only features de Graaf and van den Berg, before the full band joins in on the wonderful ‘Right Now’, which, like the vast majority of the set, is taken from Fading Lines.
Bassist Casper Broekaart begins the rolling bass that for a second sounds like ‘Under The Boardwalk’ but turns out to be standout album track ‘Perpetuum Mobile’. The five-piece band (completed by drummer Jaap Bontekoe) bring a new energy to the songs and there is a real chemistry between the group. There is a celebratory feel to the show, which the really excellent sound mix in the venue helps the audience connect to.
De Graaf is a modest but endearing host, explaining how, although this is the band’s first public appearance in Birmingham, the band used nearby rehearsal rooms to ready themselves for their appearance at Lunar Festival, which took place in the relatively local Tamworth-in-Arden, birthplace of Nick Drake. The crowd laugh when de Graaf describes playing Lunar as being ‘in the mountains’, quickly reminding the audience that the band is from the famously flat Holland, after all. The Drake theme continues with an inspired version of the late singer-songwriter’s ‘Which Will’, which, pleasingly, in these days of pallid life-sucking covers, is presented in an up-tempo take, and could actually fit seamlessly onto the album.
The band don’t leave the stage after the ‘last’ song, de Graaf explaining that the audience expects the band to come back, so why not just stay on stage instead of indulging in the pointless time-honoured ritual of walking off and back on. ‘What A Heart Can Contain’ is the only song (the Nick Drake cover excepted) that doesn’t feature on Fading Lines – it is introduced as ‘an old song’, coming as it does from way back in 2015!
The subtle ‘Apophenia’ is followed by the mighty ‘Turning Light’ on which the band up the volume and create something of a sonic assault compared to the more laid back album version. It is a fitting end to a special gig. No-one present doubts the wisdom of de Graaf’s change of career direction.
