It's been a long time since Augie March played their home state, let alone their debut album material.
So for the band to finally get to roll out their 2000 debut 'Sunset Studies' after a few years of touring 'upheaval', it was clear that this Friday night crowd (1 April) not only had babysitters booked but were out to celebrate (so much so that within two songs the bar had run out of champagne flutes).While the Croxton can be a challenging place to see shows, being more long than wide, it was a great choice of venue for the band and the sound couldn't have been better.
Frontman Glenn Richards halfway through admitted he was doing his best after accommodation dramas; you'd never have picked he was on three-hours sleep by the way he and the band delivered.
It wasn't hard to guess the set list for the night, of course, but looking back at the record almost 22 years later it was instantly evident how well it's aged, how proud of it the band are, and how wildly ambitious it was (while also somehow having the pop sensibilities to reach a much larger audience).
If seven-minute opener 'The Hole In Your Roof' set the scene, the rest of the set was hard to fault. And the playing of this whole album presented, live, what fans already knew; the band's ability to cover a lot of musical ground while packaging it up with genuine feeling and melody, is in Crowded House territory.
Fittingly, 'There Is No Such Place' and 'Asleep In Perfection' – both songs not unlike a Neil Finn-style marrying of beauty and sadness – were standouts, and perhaps the quietest an audience at the Croxton on a Friday night has ever been.
Despite the gravitas of 'Sunset Studies', Richards has always seemed relatable. So while his self-effacement between songs (how the band hated playing one particular song because of the "73 chords" he included) never felt flippant – which has been the tone of some acts playing a 'seminal' album – he and the entire group played the show like it was a new album, not something released when they were half their age.
From the quietest moments to the (moderately) loudest – 'Here Comes the Night' is something else live – it was just as enjoyable to see a band play a record from decades ago that they're still clearly proud of.
Not surprisingly, they finished on one encore song – 'The Night Is A Blackbird' from 2002's 'Strange Bird' – which was both enough for fans wanting more and those others not eager to erase the all-encompassing start-to-end ride of 'Sunset Studies'.
