Gig Review: The Maccabees At Kirkstall Abbey

A decade after calling it quits at the height of their powers, The Maccabees return to Kirkstall Abbey sounding as urgent, hungry and unfinished as ever.

On Monday 8th August 2016, The Maccabees announced, to some shock and much sadness, that after a 14-year run that spawned four excellent albums, the band had ended. It was not acrimonious, the statement said. It was mutual. The band had shocked everyone and quit just a year after releasing what was perhaps their best record and playing what were certainly their biggest shows. They appeared to be heading to their peak: they had cut free of their peers and looked set to headline festivals. They chose to call it a day instead. That decision made their career feel unfinished. Still, the lack of fallings-out or unbridgeable creative differences made it seem inevitable that the group would, at some point, come back, and in the summer of 2025, they did. Headline slots at All Points East and Glastonbury confirmed that their crown was only ever rested, not retired.

So successful was last year’s comeback that the band returned this summer with a string of outdoor shows, picking up where they left off a decade ago. They headline a nostalgia bill at Kirkstall Abbey in Leeds in the last hurrah of the summer. Flanked by the ruins of a Cistercian monastery and overlooked by great ash trees, the quintet mostly draw from their first two albums. As one of the many bands born in the post-Strokes boom of the early 2000s, The Maccabees could stake a claim to the New Yorkers’ tight songcraft, though the UK band swap effortless cool for anxious, suburban growing pains. Songs about leisure centres (‘Latchmere’), growing up (‘Lego’) and the foreshadowing of heartbreak (‘First Love’, ‘Precious Time’, ‘X-Ray’) are soundtracked by frenzied guitars, pushed into the limelight by a frolicsome rhythm section, like prescribing ProPlus and caffeine to quell panic. The manifestation of their music is rhythm guitarist Felix White, who has always been the most enthusiastic Maccabee. He takes over from the bashful singer Orlando Weeks to lead the crowd interaction with well-tested stage patter: “sing along if you know this one”, “let’s make tonight the best night of the tour”, etc. They sound as urgent and hungry as they did when their debut came out almost 20 years ago.

Nostalgia is in high demand. The crowd are all of the age to have attended Maccabees shows the first time around. The support reflects this, too. Fiona Lee is the only new act on the bill and her songs, which have the same arena-shooting DNA as Sam Fender’s, play while the venue is still filling up. The rest of the bill came of age at the same time as The Maccabees did and has an easier job of drawing in a crowd. The Mystery Jets and Everything Everything eschew new material in favour of well-known hits. The latter, clad in yellow jumpsuits that land somewhere between Walter White and Ali G, deliver a freakishly fun set of falsetto dance-indie that pulls heavily from their excellent 2015 album Get To Heaven. Maxïmo Park, who complete the lineup, attempt a set closer to career-spanning. Nine albums in, they may be entitled to show their range, but the applause they receive is only more than polite when they tear through the best songs from their debut A Certain Trigger.

Though The Maccabees are the only band on the bill not to have released any new material since their last album, Marks To Prove It, came out over a decade ago, they deserve the headline slot. Their songs are better. Songs from that final album take on huge, propulsive forms. ‘Spit It Out’ and ‘Kamakura’ build into squalls that shake the ground and reopen a question asked when the band broke up: “how can The Maccabees end now, with songs this good in the bag?” ‘Marks To Prove It’ is as rousing as the day it was released, in part because Felix demands the crowd join him in the long, opening scream that launches the song. Even ‘Silence’ morphs from a quiet piano number into an all-conquering, heart-aching zenith that requires Weeks to follow with a twee, kindly version of ‘Toothpaste Kisses’ to settle everyone’s emotions.

Given to the Wild, the band’s third and most expansive record, is underrepresented. Those songs are too widescreen for tonight, where it sounds like the band want to wrap themselves within the tight rhythms that barely pause for breath. They play one new song, pulled from a basket of music Weeks tells us contains “lots of music that isn’t good enough to play, but some music that is good enough to play”. The unveiling of ‘Ballad of So Long’ is perhaps a sheepish acknowledgement that by relying on old material his band are operating within their comfort zone. The new song is doused in the hopeful melancholy that The Maccabees do so well. It is also an intriguing feint on which to end their summer: they could depart again, freshly established as the best in class, or they could be priming themselves for a new chapter, flexing their muscles before completing what they had previously left unfinished.