10/17 The Wedding Present @ Mohawk

Many in Austin seemed to have forgotten about the decades of hard work that David Gedge has put forth for our ears. Since 1984 he has consistently provided us with a plethora of guitar-driven pop music set to ideas of loss and love. Perhaps we consider it cliche now, but Gedge has been at the helm for a long time, and he brought his group The Wedding Present to the Mohawk Friday, October 17th. Follow the jump to read about the show.

Opening the night was local Austin act New Roman Times, and they were pleasantly surprising. Their music was concise and guitar driven, which seemed to be the thing for this particular evening out on the town. Despite some apparent technical difficulties the band managed to play a strikingly irresistible set to the small audience that arrived early for the evening. They were followed by the Jealous Girlfriends, who didn’t really have much to offer the crowd. They came off as bland and inconsistent, which led many to settle into incessant talking, an unfortunate Austin side-effect that would carry into the later set by Gedge. 

David Gedge, and his band, took to the stage with ferocity, immediately getting to work on their guitars. They hammered out several songs before they even had a chance to approach talking with the audience. Seeing as they had a huge spectrum of albums to pull from, including Gedge’s other band Cinerama, they just went right ahead playing to the pogoing of the interested listeners.  

Gedge looked every bit as comfortable as he has in the past, coming off like a poor man’s Robert Pollard, gesturing to the crowd with miniscule antics as he belted out lyric after lyric. Clearly, he hasn’t lost a step, and with the recent release of El Rey, it’s clear that he can continue to keep on pushing ahead with amazing tunes. His approach, a no-nonsense, straight-ahead guitar driven sound is quite refreshing in today’s world of ambient noise and walls of sound.  

The only detractor from the evening’s show was that the force of The Wedding Present would have hit those in attendance twice as hard had someone, possibly the band, turned the guitars up just a little bit louder, for they often sounded too quiet for the inner power of the chords. All in all, it was good to see David Gedge back.