Dublin Castle, London
In November 2008, and with an eponymous debut album to promote, The Airborne Toxic Event played 30 shows across the UK in 30 days, including a month-long residency in what frontman Mikel Jollett describes as "this tiny little room". "When we first got here we thought, 'What the fuck is this place?'" he remembers fondly.
Despite playing close to 400 shows around their first album, that infamous British tour helped turn TATE from a local LA band into an international draw. Now, on the eve of their second release, All at Once, they are revisiting old haunts on the five-night British leg of their Origins tour. The 150-capacity Dublin Castle is their smallest show and has the feeling of a family get-together, with Jollett playing the likable big brother. "Everyone sounds properly pissed," he comments approvingly as fans old and predominantly new roar through almost two hours of rollicking, heartbroken pop and epic Anglophile indie.
After a blood-pumping beginning with Wishing Well – which sounds like Bruce Springsteen backed by Razorlight – the party is put on hold as the five-piece work through the darker, mortality-questioning songs of All at Once. Anna Bulbrook's violin drives the anxiety of All I Ever Wanted, while Jollett describes Half of Something Else as "our first ever love song", and mutters the intimate lyrics as though reluctant to let them go.
Effective as the simmering rawness of material like All for a Woman undoubtedly is, it is the good-time rock'n'roll of Gasoline that makes the night come alive. Jollett plays guitar hard and fast and goes back to back with bassist and Joe Strummer lookalike Noah Harmon, before a blazing encore of the brilliant Does This Mean You're Moving On? and Missy, which dips into Springsteen's I'm on Fire and Cash's Folsom Prison Blues along the way, turning this backwards glance into a memorable celebration.