“It’s great to be back here,” intoned lead Soundtracker Ebbot Lundberg, looking not completely unlike Brendan Gleeson unconvincingly playing St. Francis Of Assisi. “Although I’m not sure if we’re really here yet.” Could have fooled us. By this point in the set they had already powered through a good 30 minutes of solid jams from their just-out-in-America double album Communion, rocking the argyles off the modestly crowded Monday night crowd.
Still, the questioning hesitancy of Lundberg’s comment spoke to the authenticity of TSOOL’s journey to rock’s psychedelic heart. Judging from the balding pates around me, I’m going to guess that the ’60s and ’70s musical reference points that the band pilfer so liberally actually were the soundtrack to the lives of most people in attendance. But TSOOL still manage to make their songs relevant to our times – and not just because one of the new ones is about Second Life.
The band’s inclusion of a tastefully cherry-picked cover like Nick Drake’s “Fly” might make it seem as if their set had been decided by committee at a MOJO editorial meeting. But the band are more than just shameless magpies, and the nearly two-hour set showed they have the songs and the chops to sustain an earnest quest for the classic-rock grail. More importantly, there is an underlying gravity to the band’s psych yearnings: “Broken Imaginary Time,” from 2002’s Behind the Music, was an early set highlight, crawling out from under the heavy haze of a church-y organ intro into a solemn death march, thence into the centre of the mind, its weepy mantra – “You’re just a lightweight after all” – throbbing with the gravity of drugged-out disillusionment. Proceedings turned more chipper and uplifting with the Sly Stone-esque whump of “Sister Surround,” complete with Lundberg’s impressive approximation of Jagger’s ’65 swagger. Impressively mustachio’d and chest-hair-baring guitarist Mattias Bärjed often embodied the insane dynamics his band employs, whether whipping out an acoustic for a carefully arpeggiated piece in tandem with Martin Hederos’s occasionally harpsichordish piano arrangements, or going balls-out ballistic in a fit of backward-bent screaming-eagle fret-blazing.
