The British rock band Nothing But Thieves is often pushed into the vein of Queens of the Stone Age and Muse. Yes duh, the observant Pinkpop connoisseur thinks today: in a break like that of ‘Everybody Crazy’ (underlined with a pink confetti shower), Josh Homme and his friends are very conspicuously borrowed. The bluesy licks and heavy shuffle of ‘Forever and Ever More’ are also a bit like it, and singer Conor Mason has a voice that can screechingly high like Matthew Bellamy can do too well. Oh yeah, and the third album Moral Panic† That’s a record about the evil internet slowly but surely poisoning the world (and the desire to unplug, baby).
It made Nothing But Thieves the type of rock band that there are few left, one that can easily sell out the Ziggo Dome and has since grown into the subheadliner of Pinkpop Friday. And for that such an hour-long show is just a bit too boring. Not as boring as reading the phone book from cover to cover to your five-month-old baby, counting from 1 to 725, watching a blade of grass grow. Yet… . Pretty boring. Yes, they play their Rock with a capital R very tight, they have some serious anthems but otherwise not much happens on stage. Mason drinks a cup of tea to save his voice. He’s happy we’re here. There’s an instrumental jam that starts nowhere and goes nowhere. There’s confetti. Twice even. There’s nothing wrong with that. Well.
But: we couldn’t add many new songs to the canon of rock anthems in the past 10 years, ‘Amsterdam’ by Nothing But Thieves certainly fits in. It’s one of those tunes that you can shamelessly sing along to ‘YEAH’, some pretty useless lyrics (‘We live and then we die as one. Yeah, we all live under the same sun.’ Rhymes, so it’s the truth. ) and a perfectly pathetic chorus about hitting the same wall over and over again, while you’ve lost your heart in Amsterdam. No idea what he means by that, but hey: anthem! Pinkpop swallows it like sweet cookies.
THE MOMENT:
What sets Nothing But Thieves apart from the harder rock bands? The band has no problem concluding with the total swoon-cuddle-rock ballad ‘Impossible’ (the clue: ‘I thought it was impossible but you make it possible!’) with a great beer lifting moment. Just cuddle!
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