Live Review: The Paper Kites, Patrick James

The Woolly Mammoth is stiflingly hot this evening. Someone mercifully turns the air-conditioning on eventually, as Patrick James takes to the stage with his amicable three-piece band. Kicking off with the up-tempo In New Light, the dreamy singer-songwriter wears a loosely buttoned short-sleeve shirt and radiates charisma. Fight With Me sees the band joining in with harmonies, before he introduces a few songs from his recent Outlier album. There’s an amorous atmosphere about the crowd as couples cling to one another during Make Me Stronger and Kings & Queens, although his acoustic cover of The Killers' Runaways lacks any of the Springsteen-inspired urgency of the original. All About To Change and California Song finish things on a high note, while it’s a little hard to take lines like, “It’s time to make mistakes,” when they’re coming from a man whose music is completely devoid of them.

It’s not quite the morning yet when Frank Sinatra’s indelible In The Wee Small Hours drifts through the crowd, and The Paper Kites wait until the song is nearly finished before making their way onto the stage. Frontman Sam Bentley and the rest of the band are dressed in understated clothing, save for multi-instrumentalist Christina Lacy, whose subtle floral dress glows turquoise-blue in the dark. Picking up the theme from where Sinatra left off, the band start with two of their new nocturnal-sounding songs, Electric Indigo and Renegade. “I could cut my hair but it don’t change the man I am,” Bentley sings, almost a statement about the band’s evolving sound as much as it is about the length of his fringe. A Maker Of My Time follows, but it's struggling to match the magnetic pull of the band’s latest material.

The five-piece ease into Bleed Confusion, although the line, “And I often wonder how men spoke before they could speak,”  sticks out like a pair of mismatched socks. Bloom receives cheers from the clean-cut crowd, before Bentley and Lacy engage in an ill-fated attempt to create a hush for acoustic duets of Neon Crimson and Paint. I'm Lying To You Cause I’m Lost and the wheeling Revelator Eyes then pick things up again, and seem like a great way to finish the night, before Too Late leadens eyelids throughout the room once more. “Oh love, you have come too late,” Bentley sings, which is unfortunately a metaphor for the show this evening. There’s now people literally falling asleep on the seats skirting the room, who are rudely woken up by the dedicated fans in the audience as they applaud the band until they return for an encore with Featherstone. It’s all well and good for Bentley to write albums after midnight, but perhaps it’s too much to ask for his fans to stay awake to hear them performed.