‘How could I save it for the morning after / some kind of antimatter,’ Sandro Perri softly intones as his latest record draws to a close, his poised, unaffected deliverybestowing a gravity upon what seems in isolation to be a faintly absurd couplet. In fact, Impossible Spaces is an album saturated with‘anti-matter’; the loose compositions that make up the Toronto artist’s second full-length under his own name are anchored by an acute awareness of the importance of negative space in music.

Throughout the album, Perri’s own guitars, analogue synths and modest yet striking tenor are embellished with flourishes of flutes, strings and horns, but nowhere does he allow the ornate arrangements to overflow into gratuitous sentimentality. The wide array of instruments is used instead to colour Perri’s meandering, often elusive, vocal melodies with subtle organic textures and hints of tropicália, giving the music an intangible, breathy quality that is at once both lush and generously spacious. Sandro Perri withholds a lot from his audience. Both emotionally guarded and musically understated, Impossible Spaces can seem vaguely inconsequential when approaching it for the first time but it is in its reserved nature that the album holds its irresistible allure.There is a sense of incompleteness running through Perri’s music – melodies turn unexpectedly, or trail off completely, and moments of catharsis are completely avoided, even when threatened numerous times on the album’s centrepiece ‘Wolfman’ – surrounding the record in an intoxicating air of mystique defying full comprehension.

Impossible Spaces’ existence is a precarious one, its unassuming nature kept from slipping into insipidity only by Perri’s canny appreciation of restraint; the plodding, metronomic percussion and clunky construction of ‘Futureactive Kid (Part 1)’ provides a glimpse of how the album could have turned out had he not performed this balancing act with such dexterity elsewhere. For the most part however, Impossible Spaces is a complex album betraying a sophisticated artistic vision and what initially appears to be a polite, mild-mannered set of mid-paced folk songs slowly unfolds to reveal an endlessly engaging and subtly nuanced work.

Tom Waits needs no introduction. Now in his fifth decade of making music, the singer-songwriter has made the arc from nightclub-singer maudlin jazz-and blues in his time at Asylum Records,to the instrumentally eclectic synthesisof Swordfishtrombone and Rain Dogs in the early Eighties, the atmospheric skeletal rhythms of Bone Machine (1992), the backwoods blues and gospel of Mule Variations (1999), and ultimately the quasi-industrial Real Gone (2004).

His first studio full-length in seven years, Bad As Me is an astonishing affirmation of his unfailingtalent. Waits doesn’t necessarily tread new ground, but revisits the eclectic styles he has pioneeredin his career: the martial ‘Hell Broke Luce’, for example, with its semi-barking vocals and aggressive multi-instrumental rhythmic thumps, is strongly reminiscent of Rain Dogs.

But Bad As Me never sounds stale.In fact, Waits’ songwriting ability and innovation is once again confirmed: there isn’t a single weak track in the bunch. Moods shifts define the album, which flits from the smoky, melancholy ballad of ‘Talking at the Same Time’ to the swinging and trombone-filled ‘Get Lost’, to the downtrodden tango inflected lament of ‘Pay Me’. On the roaring ‘Satisfied’, meanwhile, Waits howls over the bluesy guitar riffs of Keith Richards (yes, that Keith Richards).

Album single ‘Bad As Me’ is far and away the standout, its echoing drums and baritone sax outshone only by Waits’ hoarse and near hysteric voice. As usual, Waits’ voice completely dominates the record. Able to convey emotion through the slightest of vocal inflections, it is equally captivating from the husky tones of ‘Back in the Crowd’to the smooth falsetto of ‘Get Lost’. The latter sees Waits chastising of irresponsibility (‘Everybody knows umbrellas will cost more in the rain’) while condemning our uneven application of those standards: ‘We bailed out all the millionaires.They’ve got the fruit, we’ve got the rind.’ What rind we have left, though, is worth spending on Bad As Me.

When I remind guitarist, Jamie MacColl, and drummer, Suren de Saram, that in a 2009 interview with this very paper they claimed that they still had university places waiting for them in case the band didn’t work out, a twinkle of mischief appears MacColl’s eye. ‘That sounds like something I’d say.’ It is a mark of the speed at which the career of Bombay Bicycle Club has progressed that just two and a half years after filling in UCAS forms they are appearing at festivals up and down the country and on BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge. ‘I’d say it’s looking pretty good right now,’ says de Saram. ‘The reception to the new album has been pretty positive on the whole so the future’s bright.’

He isn’t wrong. With the release of A Different Kind of Fix, their third fulllength, the quartet have established themselves as one of Britain’s finest young bands. Recording for this, the band’s third album in three years, took place over a period of around nine months with sessions taking place in London, Hamburg and Atlanta. For MacColl, ‘This was the most enjoyable recording process. The first album was harder for all of because we weren’t used to the studio and we felt like things were a bit out of our hands. If it came down to a decision between us and the producer, the producer usually won out.’

The year after their debut, Bombay Bicycle Club underwent a drastic change of musical direction, from the jangly-indie-pop of I Had the Blues But I Shook Them Loose, to the luscious acoustic folk of their sophomore album Flaws. MacColl confesses that this change was a bid for the band to seize control and do what they wanted, not what was expected of them.

‘I don’t know if we’d admit it but that was partly a reaction to people dismissing us as just another indie band. Principally, however, we didn’t do Flaws to escape those labels, it was just what we wanted to do.

‘The fundamental aspects of what makes us a band are still the same. All the song writing still starts with Jack [Steadman, vocalist] and as a unit we’ve always said that we just want to enjoy it and that we wouldn’t want to be a band if we didn’t get on. Making music should be a fun experience. It shouldn’t feel like work.’

Indeed, the folk release asserted the band’s musical talent and won them a more diverse group of fans. A Different Kind of Fix sees Bombay Bicycle Club plug their electric guitars back in and proves to be their most experimental effort to date, with a far denser layering of sound and the use of more sophisticated studio techniques. When asked about this, the second big change of musical direction of the band’s career and their increased confidence in the studio, MacColl answers: ‘To be honest maybe we’ve gone too far in that way, but I’d rather have done that than try to play it safe.’

Having completed a successful tour of America, the band are currently mid-way through a tour of Britain, after which they will travel around Europe via Brazil. With their new, more complex songs and busier schedule, Bombay Bicycle Club have forced themselves to develop. ‘It’s definitely harder to recreate the new stuff live. The more electronic songs have taken more work but the end result still works. We’re not just a four piece indie-rock band anymore.’

Any classicist will remember how the first read-through of a Greek tragedy feels: stilted, sometimes soporific, other times ludicrously over dramatised, always unnatural: Children of Oedipus had many of the same qualities. The acting was generally fairly average, rarely sparkling and often unbelievably awkard: none of the characters achieved the necessary emotional development, with the result that their final outbursts of lamentation seem contrived and embarrassing. It’s rare to see a Greek tragedy, even adapted, transfer well to a modern audience, and to a great extent it’s not the fault of this company.

Also certainly not their fault is the notorious problem of filling the O’Reilly, which suffers from being neither the BT, with its cosy audience of friends, nor the Playhouse, where students mingle with real grown-ups. As a result, the theatre lacks energy: a few critics, a few friends, some parents, and a couple of solitary Euripides-lovers do not a packed house make, regrettably. Audience conceptions of dramatic technique have changed too far, it seems. The emotional intensity required would be difficult for even the strongest of actors, and no one in this piece had the bravado to carry off the visceral pain experienced by the various members of the House of Cadmus as their city and their family are torn apart by internecine strife.

Nevertheless, there were some strong moments: an unusually attractive and blonde Tiresias in Jack Wills put in one of the strongest performances, aided by the clever conceit of a radio standing in for Tiresias’ messages from the gods. Also strong was the messenger speech, which was transformed into a duet by the dead brothers Polyneices and Eteocles: any lover of meta-theatre would have been delighted by the image of two dead brothers announcing their own death under the pretence of being a fairly uninteresting messenger character.

The set design was also very effective, reminding one of a decaying English country house, entirely appropriate despite its apparent anachronicity for the falling House of Cadmus. The danger of the traditional Oxford thespian self-confidence is that all your dramatic choices imagine that the acting will be fantastic in your play: for Children of Oedipus the sonorous, powerful drumbeats could have fitted very nicely into a generally strong performance, but in this middling, uninspired rendition, felt overbearing and ineffectual simultaneously. On the whole, this performance was fine: the play was delivered, the meaning got across, the lines remembered. Yet it seemed to lack any lift, any buzz, any tension, and in consequence one left feeling underwhelmed and uninspired – there was an unshakeable and destructive feeling that all involved were merely going through the motions. Euripides deserves better, but like all tragedians, seems fated never to get a truly effective, exciting modern treatment.

2.5 STARS