It must be hard for bands to pick a set-list when they’ve just released their second album. However for Good Shoes I’d imagine it would be quite easy.
Their first album was brilliant. It wasn’t particularly clever or groundbreaking but that didn’t matter in the slightest. It just danced right up to your face, jigged around a bit and then ran off to do the same to someone else, and that was fine. You didn’t really have to think about it much, but it was still a good album. At a point where so many bands were making mediocre, simple, uninteresting indie, Good Shoes turned up with something that wasn’t that much more complicated, but somehow stood out.
While it must have been tricky trying to figure out what direction to go in after a debut like theirs, ‘No Hope No Future’ is quite a heavy come-down (the title itself isn’t particularly optimistic). All the urgent, excitement of their earlier tracks has been replaced by an impotent, unnecessary grumpiness. When you slow Good Shoes down, their lack of individuality as a band comes to light and they just blend back into the hazy, colourless pool of average guitar bands, leaving yet more filler for the innovative few to swim through. As you might expect, this puts their live show in jeopardy.
The only songs that stand out from the first half of their set are ‘Ice Age’ (the only old track) and ‘The Way My Heart Beats’ which, to be fair to them, is up to the standard of their debut. Despite only being released this year, live, it sounds like you’ve heard it hundreds of times before. Now that either makes it hugely unoriginal, or something close to a perfect pop song. Luckily for them I think it might be the latter. Aside from these two, the crowd stays fairly motionless for the first twenty minutes, clearly disenchanted by the new material. However, when the old songs start turning up, the crowd sees a new lease of life. Albeit like recently woken coma patients making their first movements in twelve years after ‘No Hope No Future’, but nonetheless, the old songs still have the power to animate an audience. Final track, ‘Under Control’ keeps the energy alive and lies in the same category as ‘The Way My Heart Beats’. Pointing towards an interesting new direction for the band.
We might just have to wait till the next album to hear the complete product though.
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