Shearwater with My Sad Captains and Julie Doiron, The Scala, 3 April.

Support comes from My Sad Captains, who make pleasant enough indie/light shoegaze sounds, but without any great distinctiveness or stage presence.
Much better is Canadian Julie Doiron. Playing solo with an acoustic guitar, she seems like a slightly shy singer-songwriter with some decen tunes. This perception is pretty much shattered when her third song is a cover of Pavement’s ‘Shady Lane’. “‘No More’”, someone calls out, and she explains that she normally does that song as a medley, with a full band, but she thinks she could do it….”wait, did you mean, “don’t play any more?” cos I can do that”, she suddenly wonders. By now even the neutrals in the crowd are with her, people are calling suggestions - “yeah yeah I can do that” she responds enthusiastically. Subsequent research reveals her songs are more fuzzy North American indie, not acoustic folkery as I’d believed. She’s really rather good, either way, and would be great at EoTR.

Shearwater start with a bang. Animal Life, especially is great - it would be quite possibly the best live performance I’ve heard this year if I hadn’t seen Jeff Mangum and the Magnetic Fields. It’s tougher than the album version, with much heavier drums that don’t overwhelm the rest of the band, or Jonathan’s vocals. For me, the quality fades a little after that, but I’d put that down to wearing earplugs - I took them off again later in the set and it sounded much better, unsurprisingly. Unfortunately it was a choice of losing even more of my hearing, or missing some of the set. It could also have been that they were mainly playing songs off Animal Joy, and the audience might have been a bit muted as a result. A good gig overall, anyway.