The State had not yet become rusty. Apart from two performances in London and Paris, Rotown in Rotterdam was their first club show in a long time on Friday, for an old-fashioned full house that was immediately ‘in’ into the music. It felt good, programmer Stephan Maaskant concluded with satisfaction now that he could once again allow 250 people into the compact room. “People are standing shoulder to shoulder again. That’s how it should be, for the sense of togetherness at a pop concert.” He was able to book De Staat, actually a much too big band that is at home in the Alpha at Lowlands or the Ziggo Dome, because of the mutual eagerness to pick up the thread again.
“Welcome to the new new normal”, said singer Torre Florim after the robust opener ‘Look At Me Now’. Last year De Staat was on the Back To Liveevent at the Lowlandsterrein in Biddinghuizen, when it was the ‘new normal’ for a limited audience as part of the Fieldlab experiment. Only now there will be a serious European tour that will bring the quintet to Pinkpop in June.
bouquets
After five albums in their almost fifteen years of existence, the band from Nijmegen is doing things differently. De Staat will not release a regular album for the time being. Instead, ‘bouquets’ of three songs each appear in digital form, provided with a color code that says something about the atmosphere of the song: red for grim and hard, yellow for light-footed and danceable and blue for melancholy and/or sensitive. The Chunky ‘Look At Me’ is pre-eminently a red number. †Look at me / I got the same old faceFlorim opened the ceremony. †Are you paying attention?†
Also read this interview: The State is out: grim music is red, danceable yellow, sensitive blue
The audience moved gratefully to the familiar sounds of ‘Peptalk’ and the stumbling rhythm of the new ‘Numbers Up’ with the excited, David Byrne-reminiscent lyric ‘The key to more success is more success† Subdued in ‘One Day’ and rousing to the crackling synthesizer rhythm of ‘Who’s Gonna Be the GOAT?’ played The state the new songs with newfound concentration, where older songs like ‘Input Source Select’ and ‘Make the Call, Leave It All’ spread their angular dance rhythms through the hall as a matter of course.
In ‘Pikachu’ Florim and keyboardist Rocco Hueting did their funny synchronic dance, the latter with a new page haircut that makes him the clown of the band without much effort. In the meantime, there was intense music playing, with the contemplative ‘What Goes, Let Go’ as an atypically slow song. In the encore, it went wild as if the lockdown had to be shaken off once and for all. Bee ‘witch doctor’ Torre Florim remained on stage, gesturing, without the massive spiral movement that the audience made earlier. Shoulder to shoulder it felt good enough.
#Shoulder #shoulder #Staat #shake #lockdown