JUNGLE
****
Cardiff University Great Hall, Sat 5 May
Is there a better way to spend the Saturday evening of the hottest Early May Bank Holiday weekend on record than being cooped up in the sweaty, sticky student’s union, grooving away to the uniquely remarkable tones of Jungle? I don’t think so.
For this writer, there was initially a little bit of scepticsm about whether they would live up to expectations. Well, not only did they live up to them, they managed to massively exceed them.
Stood in front of a typically aesthetic golden backdrop of shimmery lights, the band waltzed on stage and boldly opened with a new song before roaring through renditions of Julia and The Heat, sending the busy (but not packed) crowd into a shoulder-shuffling frenzy.
The brightly-lit backdrop creates an almost holy-like silhouette of the band, forcing you to focus on the band in full and not just on one singular front man like many typical bands do.
The band, whose numbers inflate to seven when performing live despite founding members Tom McFarland and Josh Lloyd-Watson only recording as a duo, can afford to take risks with new material by having the successful hits of their debut to fall back on. New tracks Cherry and Happy Man go down just as well with the crowd as older material like Platoon and Lucky I Got What I Want – which sounds far superior live than it does on the album.
The main body of the set is a constant to and fro of songs new and old, before they wind things up with Busy Earnin’, perhaps their most famous track to date. This is certainly the one that the crowd seems to go wildest for, and it earns the band the applause and adoration needed to come back on stage and grace us with a thumping encore of Time to completely wrap up the nights grooving.
Make no mistake, Jungle have lost none of their signature soul and groove on the new material that will surely form their upcoming second album. Luckily for us fans, they also seem to still enjoy performing the older material and classics, making for an eclectic mix of silky, soulful sounds both new and old.
I have no fears that Jungle will be able to nail the difficult second album, and wont fall to ‘second album syndrome’. The evening’s proceedings have perfectly whetted the appetite for the next full release from the London groovers.
words Tom Owen