MR BEN & THE BENS | LIVE REVIEW
The Moon, Cardiff, Thurs 31 Oct
A cold Halloween evening is lit up by the visit of Mr Ben & The Bens to The Moon. Playing indie-ish pop-rock that’s nowhere near as twee as their name suggests, their strengths lie in the superb songwriting and melodic imagination, courtesy of the eponymous Ben Hall. The closest obvious parallels are Big Star, or perhaps a tougher version of Belle and Sebastian.
In the close confines of The Moon, or indeed many other such small, low-ceilinged venues, it’s always a risk that music which relies on detail and expansiveness gets lost in the noise, in venues where energy and guts is more easily rewarded than subtlety, but in this case that’s not a problem. The Bens themselves, in the Halloween spirit and kitted out with Kiss makeup, are locked in tight and the sound is crystal clear.
The songs themselves have plenty of quirkiness – topics includes a love song to a pen (How We Used To Write), swimming (The Bluest Blues), and coming to terms with mortality whilst working in a museum (My Museum) – but there’s plenty of sincerity to ensure that nothing dips into suffocated affectation. Ben Hall’s voice is sweet and high, with just enough dirt to give added colour to his expansive melodic imagination. Most of the songs avoid obvious songwriting buttons, always throwing a new idea or a new direction in there even in their relatively brief constructions – all of it practically radio ready. This reviewer arrived a smidgen too late to catch any of the support acts, because I’m inescapably lame, but nevertheless this is superb stuff.
words FEDOR TOT