Took another trip to Schuba’s last night to check out Athlete, or rather a stripped down version of Athlete. Athlete is a band from London who have a great britpop kind of sound to them, and their debut album “Tourist” was a great album, and featured the UK hit “Wires”. They actually opened for Snow Patrol when I saw them a few years ago, but I showed up too late to catch these guys, and only later realized my grave mistake when I discovered how good they were.

They played a fair mix of stuff from both of their albums, but were touring without a drummer so the songs sounded a little different, and a few of them they just did stripped down acoustic style. However, despite the lack of a drummer they still sounded great and their songs are just so catchy that it would be hard to screw it up really. There was a lot of crowd interaction and witty comments from the band throughout the show, pretty funny stuff. He was making comments like “make sure to buy some CD’s so we can afford to bring Steve the drummer next time”. All in all a great show, very upbeat and high energy for having no drummer. I think they are touring with Switchfoot maybe on this US tour, and only a few of these dates are headliner dates, but check them out if you can on this tour, or certainly if they come back as a full band with headliner dates I recommend checking them out. And I also really recommend checking out their albums, because they are really good stuff, it’s kind of surprising they aren’t more popular really.

Athlete – Airport Disco – From Beyond the Neighbourhood