Watch Alvvays perform their long-awaited Tiny Desk Concert
Canadian indie pop favourites Alvvays are the latest band to take on the challenges of the Tiny Desk Concert, performing a series of songs from their latest album, Blue Rev.
From behind the now-iconic desk, the five-piece opened with the single ‘Belinda Says‘, delivering the track with as much polish and precision as on record. As the song reaches its end, lead vocalist Molly Rankin thanked the audience for coming and acknowledged that the performance had been “a long time coming”.
“We’ve not worked up the courage to do this until today,” she added, “We’re called Alvvays and… what else? You guys already know that.” The band went on to play album tracks ‘Pressed’ and ‘Tile by Tile’, alongside ‘Very Online Guy’, which formed a joint single with ‘Belinda Says’.
Ahead of their live rendition of the joint single, Rankin also took the opportunity to joke around with the crew, recalling, “We met some of the NPR staff a few nights ago at a restaurant, which was sweet, but we made a backdoor deal that I was taking over for Bob after he retired. Thanks for 35 years, but yeah.”
Despite its name, Alvvays’ sound is anything but tiny. Somehow overcoming the restraints of reverb imposed by NPR for the series, the band sounds just as lively and layered as ever.
In a three-and-a-half star review of Blue Rev, Far Out‘s Tyler Golsen concluded that the record didn’t “quite live up to the lofty standards that Alvvays established with their first two albums” but was still a “wonderfully wonky return from indie pop’s premiere band”.
Watch the band’s entry into the Tiny Desk series below.
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