Tom Vek - Classic Grand, Glasgow, Tue 14 Jun 2011

After the critical acclaim and moderate commercial success of Tom Vek’s 2005 debut album, We Have Sound, it looked, on paper at least, like he was on to a winner. Instead, despite pursuing the potentially long and fruitful career ahead of him, he more or less dropped off the map, retiring from public view for nearly six years and emerging only recently to drop his somewhat unexpected follow-up, Leisure Seizure.

That being said, he isn’t exactly rusty as he makes his long-awaited and welcome return to Glasgow. Confidently, Vek and his accomplished cast of multi-instrumentalists kick the night off in style with a flawless rendition of first-time-around hit, ‘C-C (You Set The Fire In Me)’. Blurring the lines between scratchy post-punk and dance grooves, it’s not long before the furious shape-cutting begins.

While it never dips criminally low, new material from Leisure Seizure understandably falls a little flatter than some of the more familiar, scrappy floor-fillers, but ‘A Chore’ and ‘A.P.O.L.O.G.Y.’ certainly do their best to coax a buzz. The only real drag is Vek’s signature disaffected drawl which, despite striking gold with a belter of a David Byrne impression on ‘Nothing But Green Lights’, grows pretty tiresome after an hour of near tunelessness.