Echo & The Bunnymen Embrace Their Past

Queen Elizabeth Theatre

Toronto, ON

on Oct 20 2009

Caitlin Hotchkiss (CHARTattack)

10/21/2009 2:29pm

You can say this for Echo & The Bunnymen: They know how to do a tour right.

That's to say, it's rather difficult for any of the old '80s British rock bands to do tours these days, let alone ones to promote new material what with people only really wanting to hear the hits and classics. Having just put out new album, The Fountain, they chose a smart route in addressing this dilemma by doing a theatre tour that's half made up of new material and half made up of entirely old favourites.

For the first part of the show, the five-piece Bunnymen took to the fog-swirled theatre stage and proceeded to make more gloriously loud music than I thought was capable of the atmospheric post-punk band of yore. Maybe it was the Queen Elizabeth Theatre's acoustics or maybe it was a really good sound guy, but the sheer encompassing volume of their musicianship was grandly displayed, both in older songs like "All That Jazz" and "Rescue," as well as newer material like current single "Think I Need It Too."

I remember reviewing a live Echo & The Bunnymen DVD a few years ago, and I was pretty unimpressed by how stoic and un-dynamic they were onstage. Not much on that front has changed — frontman Ian McCulloch tends to stand stark-still at the microphone, staring out at the audience from behind mirrored shades.

But this detachment can be tolerated, though, given the power of his barely-aged vocals. McCulloch's singing voice has always been raw-edged and almost sinister, and this remains true today. He sounded fantastic in front of the appreciative Toronto crowd.

A raucous performance of "The Cutter" that was the highlight of the show's first act (although "Bring On The Dancing Horses" got the first real excited applause of the night, and aptly so), with more than a few people standing up to dance in their seats. Closing their set with a mash-up of "Nothing Lasts Forever" alongside Lou Reed's "Walk On The Wild Side," McCulloch promised that they'd be back "after we let you go powder your noses."

This second half of the set was the obvious bone for most attendees: a recreation of the band's seminal 1984 album Ocean Rain backed by a live orchestra. This was the album that the crowd — whose median age was approximately 42 — was devoted to, and to perform it with full band plus strings and percussion was something to experience indeed.

All of the songs were amplified, of course, with the most obvious one being a thundering "Thorn Of Crowns." However, the Bunnymen could have pulled it out a bit more for the presumed show-stopper "The Killing Moon" — the verses were quiet and stripped-down while the choruses were disproportionately punchy, which made the performance jarring and uneven.

There was also a photo slideshow going on in the background, which mostly featured old black-and-white shots of the band members as wide-eyed, messy-haired waifs in unfortunate sweaters. (How did the young McCulloch ever see with that shelf of bangs constantly hanging in his eyes?)

Rather than being overly precious, it made for a pretty powerful juxtaposition with what was going on onstage, and it could definitely be seen on a larger symbolic scale: Echo & The Bunnymen aren't afraid to embrace their past. And what a great thing that is.