8:30pm-9:10pm Causes

Causes are a European band based in Amsterdam, the singer is English whereas the other members are from The Netherlands, Germany and France. They play well mostly in high notes, sound wise their music is colourful. They play a beautiful cover of the song “On My Mind” by Ellie Goulding. In their songs there are lots of falsettos, high notes and drums, their style reminds me a bit of the early Bastille.

Their song “Teach me how to dance with you” is great, and the accent of the British singer can be heard clearly.

They dedicate “Lights beside you”, a delicate tune on the piano, to Belgium because of the terrorist attacks that took place in Brussels on the day of the concert (22.03.2016).

Their sound is pop with a sprinkle of guitars and bass which give to it a bit of a light rock direction.

9:45-11:05pm Josef Salvat

The gig opens with an instrumental intro for “Night Swim” played by the band. Josef Salvat comes on stage and starts singing. The Aussie singer surprisingly speaks French pretty well! He also sings a couple of songs in French! He likes talking to the audience and introduces every song by saying the title adding a few phrases of explanations at times.

His amazing voice at times deep at times pretty high breaks here and there. It is sometimes accompanied by the piano more in a quiet way and other times the synth add that synth pop sound.

He plays a beautiful cover of “Diamonds” by Rihanna, it is the cover who made him well known to the public in 2014. It sounds different than the original of course, but it’s interesting and nice to hear a male voice sing this song.

He introduces “Better Word” saying it´s the last song he wrote in the album Night Swim (2016). It’s a song about the difficulty of using the word “love” in English to mean something. Josef Salvat adds that he has a cold heart and that’s why he doesn’t get it. As he starts playing the piano and sing, many hands in the audience put a red heart-shaped paper in the air, that a woman in the audience had distributed before his set. As he sees all these red hearts before him he stops singing exclaiming “no this is not possible, what a fuck!” unable to hide his emotions. He says “you guys are amazing this is the best thing which happened in the last three weeks!”, a truly special moment which proves that his heart is not that cold after all!

He sings the touching “You Don’t Know What Love Is” by trumpeter Chet Baker. As Causes before, he also dedicates a song, “The Days”, to the victims of the terrorist attacks in Brussels. It’s a song of hope and optimism, hard things to believe in, in a sad day like this, he says. The audience claps loudly and assents before he starts and shares this song with us.

Josef Salvat with his music brings some nice groove and electro pop into the world. The first part of the set ends with “Open Season” a song for which the remix, is sadly, more well known than the original.

Josef Salvat comes back on stage to play a few more songs before bidding goodbye for good with “This Life”.

 

Simona @TakeMe2aConcert