Where Worlds Collide

Friday night saw The Reasoning’s first gig in central London, at the Borderline.

The Borderline is a small club just off Charing Cross Road, quite a bit smaller than Crewe Limelight where I’d seem them back in April. As seems usual for just about every gig I go to nowadays, I recognised quite a few familiar faces in the crowd, both from previous Reasoning gigs and from the Mostly Autumn fanbase. I also put a lot of faces to names for people from the Reasoning forum and TheStorm mailing list. By the time the band hit the stage, the place was pretty much packed.

It didn’t take very long to show just how far this band have progressed in the eight short months since their first gig in Swansea. They’ve really gelled as a live act now, and have the perfect combination of tightness, energy and emotional intensity. The band were clearly enjoying being on stage, and feeding off the tremendous enthusiasm of the crowd. They were also blessed with a good sound mix, which meant you could hear every instrument and each voice clearly. I noticed Gareth’s vocal contributions a lot more this time.

Naturally songs from “Awakening” made up the bulk of the set, although their version of Karnataka’s magnificent “Talk to Me” is still one of the high points of the show. They also introduced two new songs from the forthcoming album “Dark Angel”, the title track, and “Breaking the Fourth Wall”. Both sounded impressive on first listening, the former reminding me a little bit (but not too much) of Dream Theater. This augers well for the new album.

In short, The Reasoning rock. If they keep up this momentum (and I’m sure they will), they’ll be playing much bigger venues than this in a year or two’s time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 6:43 pm and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.