UEA, Norwich February 16, 2023
by Paul Jones
Easy Life enter to thunderous applause from the mainly teenage crowd, who have filled the 1,500-capacity LCR tonight.
Drummer Oliver Cassidy, who has the stage presence to be a frontman, points to the impressive stage set-up as if to say “Look, look what we have created!”
And it is impressive, with the large neon-lit “EASY LIFE” letters and home-themed wallpaper and furniture distributed here and there.
They get under way with Growing Pains, from second album Maybe In Another Life – a slow-tempo, groove-filled track that has the young crowd moving from the off – before they take us through a 20-song set that highlights just how many hits they have had in such a short time since they began life in Leicester in 2017. (Half of their career, of course, included a global pandemic.)
Easy Life are an odd band and incomparable to anyone else around at the moment. They’re sometimes wrongly pigeonholed as an alternative indie pop group, but their sound is a mix of a down-tempo soul/jazz group, a post-Dr Dre Chronic-era US West Coast rap outfit, and a Disclosure-esque UK dance group.
Tonight the five-piece outfit and their three backing singers – at various times with a saxophone, a brass section, a keyboard as well as several guitars – are tight throughout.
Their energy is infectious, moving seamlessly from down-tempo to lively and back again throughout the evening. We get songs in an order that perhaps shouldn’t work but somehow does.
Highlights include Sangria early on, Skeletons during the second half of the set and the triple-header of Beeswax, Pockets and Nightmares as the encore.
It is testament to how far Easy Life have come in a very short time that they are selling out some of the larger venues in cities across the UK on this tour.
And with frontman Murray Matravers seemingly fully recovered from the on-stage disaster he had in Glasgow the other night, those still to catch them on their final few dates are in for a treat.
