Reviewed on Friday October 16
The Basement felt warm, friendly and jovial on Friday night with a rather unusual and intimate set-up – the performers were in the middle of the room while the audience was standing by the bar and sitting onstage, circled around the performance space.
To begin, William Crighton brought a folky sound to the floor with his eight-string ukulele in tow. Wailing vocals mourned to the crowd while gentle uke strumming softened the blow. His friend Ruben came and joined him for a couple of tunes to play a masterful harmonica line (once he’d finished his pizza at the bar, of course), something that really set the tone for how casual the rest of the night was going to be.
The Basics opened with three strong songs from their latest album, The Age Of Entitlement. Their immediate strengths lay in tight, mixed percussion techniques, warm three-part harmonies and the energy and chemistry that came from being great friends and bandmates.
Though The Basics are on tour to promote their album, they were set on breaking down the barrier between band and audience, hence the odd set-up. So the show dipped in between performing tight tracks from the record to experimenting with covers (some of which they had first played in soundcheck). This gave proceedings a jam session kind of feel, which at times worked well, but at others became frustrating.
It was clear that it had been a while since they’d got the band back together, with everyone pursuing their own side projects (the most well known being drummer Wally de Backer as Gotye), so sometimes the performance was unpolished, with forgotten lyrics and wrong chords. There were moments of tension too, in the form of occasional arguments onstage that were turned into jokes.
But The Basics are a group of three incredibly talented musicians with unstoppable charisma, so they managed to pull off this style of performance with the audience only wanting more and even demanding an encore at the end. They claimed to have learned the chords for it backstage while everyone was cheering.
